PS 2318 
.A1 



si 111 
III 11 

iliil 



iiii 





^^^^^Hp -HA^DY- ^ 
^^^^^H -VOLUME- 


I 




Class TS g3|g 
Book . r\ \ 



COPYRK.HT DEPOSIT. 



FIRESIDE TRAVELS 



BY 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 



WITH INTRODUCTION 
BY 

WILLIAM P. TRENT 



" Travelling makes a man sit still in his old age ivith satis- 
faction, and travel over the world again in his chair and bed 
by discourse and thoughts." 

— The Voyage of Italy, by Richard Lassels, Gent, 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 



IfRRARYovCONGRFSS 

Two Conies Received 

JUL 25 »906 

'Gr.;ypn,r\u Hr.try 
iA3^ CL XXc, No. 

/cr/6 7/ 






Copyright, 1906, 
By THOMAS Y. CROWELL 



CO. 



To 

w. w. s. 

Who carves his thought in marble will not scorn 
These pictured bubbles, if so far they fly; 
They will recall clays ruddy but with morn, 
Not red like these late past or drawing nigh ! 



The greater part of this volume was printed ten 
years ago in Ptitnams Monthly and Grahajfi's Maga- 
zme. The additions (most of them about Italy) 
have been made up, as the original matter was, from 
old letters and journals written on the spot. My 
wish was to describe not so much what I went to see. 
as what I saw that was most unlike what one sees at 
home. If the reader find entertainment, he will find 
all I hoped to give him. 

1864. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Cambridge Thirty Years Ago .... 3 

A MoosEHEAD Journal 58 

Leaves from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere. 

At Sea loi 

In the Mediterranean 114 

Italy 122 

A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic . . .182 



vii 



INTRODUCTION. 

One would scarcely guess from its peaceful, at- 
tractive title and its genial contents that the little 
volume here presented began its existence as a book 
— and existence as a book, it should be remembered, 
is something very different from existence in the form 
of scattered articles in magazines — in the fourth 
year of that great war between the States in which 
the intensely patriotic Lowell took so fervid an in- 
terest. The ''Fireside Travels" of such a man at 
such a time must have been actually turned to the 
fields and thickets and swamps of Virginia, where 
Lee with his diminishing forces was bravely but 
vainly contesting the advance of Grant and his well- 
recruited army. "The President's PoHcy," "Mc- 
Clellan's Report," "The Rebellion: its Causes and 
Consequences," these items from Lowell's bibliog- 
raphy for the year of grace — or, less ironically, the 
year of strife — 1864 seem much more appropriate 
to the epoch than a sketch of by-gone Cambridge, 
a journal of woodland life, a collection of traveller's 
notes. Newly assumed editorial duties on the old 
and influential North American Review, where he 
could display some at least of the energy and acumen 
he had shown as a journalist in the anti-slavery cause, 
had in their selves nothing incompatible with the 



X INTR OD UC TION. 

character of the times or of the versatile man — part 
poet, part professor, part critic, part publicist; but 
extracting articles from ten -year-old magazines, re- 
vising them, and seeing them through the press in a 
new form would seem to be, mutatis mutandis^ the 
occupation of a Herrick rather than of a Lowell 
during a great civil war. 

A moment's reflection, however, shows us that this 
is an entirely superficial view of the matter. Lowell 
was no exception to the rule that in times of stress 
the spirit craves and needs the contrast and relaxation 
afforded by excursions of the imagination or the 
memory or both into the enchanted regions of the 
ideal, whether of the golden past or of the golden 
future. Perhaps, as he corrected the proofs of his 
new volume — practically his seventh appearance be- 
tween boards, but only his second as a writer of prose 
— Lowell's thoughts turned to old Cambridge,' where 
men destined to prominence in field or rouncil had 
strolled as careless and happy college youths, or to 
a little grave in Rome, where a tiny boy ^ lay buried 
who could never sport under the Harvard elms and 
add academic lustre to an honored name. 

Why "Fireside Travels" was published when it 
was, and what Lowell thought about the book at the 
time, are matters upon which his correspondence and 

1 The use of this phrase at once recalls the " Old Cam- 
bridge " of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to which 
readers of the first of the essays in this volume will do well to 
turn. 

2 Walter Lowell, James Russell Lowell's only son, born 
22d Dec, 1850; died gih June, 1852. Scudder's "James 
Russell Lowell," IL, 418. 



INTR OD UCTION. xi 

the chief biographical sources of information appear 
to throw no light whatsoever. His letters of 1864 
show plainly that his active mind frequently turned 
away from thoughts of politics and carnage. He 
congratulates Mr. Howells on the latter's "Venetian 
letters in the Advertiser. " He tells Professor Norton 
that he is enjoying his vacation with proofs every day 

— the proofs being those of the first volume of a 
frustrated series of select old plays. He drops, with 
his accustomed facility, into doggerel — of the inten- 
tional and somewhat bearable variety — but nowhere 
does he say a word about "Fireside Travels." Mr. 
Scudder's index does not record any mention of it in 
the two chapters of one hundred and fifty pages 
devoted to Lowell's hfe between 1S58 and 1872. Nor 
is the case much improved when we turn back ten 
years to learn something about the component parts 
of the volume when they first appeared. 

"A Moosehead Journal" was published in Novem- 
ber, 1853, in that promising but short-lived periodical, 
Putnam's Magazine^ of which Lowell's friend, C. F. 
Briggs, was one of the editors. Mr. Scudder tells us 
that Briggs received the contribution enthusiastically 
and that it "was in effect a journal, sent home" to 
Lowell's wife, "of an excursion made by Lowell in 
the summer of 1853 with his nephew Charles." ' In 
September the author, writing to his editor, remarked : 

— "Don't cut it in halves. It will make but eleven 

1 The " Young Telemachus," General Charles Russell 
Lowell, Jr., who fell at the battle of Cedar Creek. His widow, 
Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, became one of the best-known 
philanthropists of New York City. 



Xll INTK OD UC TION. 

pages/ and is much better all together. If it is dull, 
the public won't thank you for making two doses of it; 
if entertaining, they will be glad to have it all at once." 
One scarcely believes that Lowell really thought his 
article dull; one has no doubt whatsoever as to his 
editorial sagacity. 

"Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" appeared in 
PutnairCs for April and May, 1854. It then bore 
the title which ten years later Lowell reserved for his 
entire volume — those seductive words, "Fireside 
Travels." According to Mr. Scudder, the germ of 
the paper was a sketch of the painter -poet Washington 
AUston, which, in September, 1853, Lowell began for 
Putnani's, but did not put to separate use. The 
verses to Menenius, happily few in number, were 
taken from another contribution intended for Put- 
nani's, the unprinted portion of the long serio-comic 
poem "Our Own," which Mr. Scudder, curiously 
enough, conceived to have been written in Alexan- 
drines, and the readers of Putnam^ s in 1853, less 
curiously, wished discontinued as soon as possible. 
Writing to Briggs, Lowell affirmed, as well he might 
without conceit, that his sketch of Cambridge was 
done as nobody but he could do it, for no one else 
knew the old town so well. "It is better than that 
Moosehead thing," he wrote, "and Maria liked it." 
The last three words have a pathos of their own, when 
we remember that the lovely and talented wife, who 
had done so much to keep Lowell's genius from 
diffusing itself in flats and shallows, "went home," to 

1 It made over twelve. 



INTRODUCTION. Xlll 

use her husband's words, on October 27, 1853. She 
never saw in print the dehghtful essay that had 
charmed her in its unfinished state. 

Neither did she see the printed records of the 
ItaHan journey she had made with her husband and 
children in 185 1 and 1852, for they were first published 
as ''Leaves from my Italian Journey" in Graham's 
Magazine for April, May, and July, 1854. But she 
had seen the land of romance with him, even if she 
had buried her little son there, and Lowell had doubt- 
less read to her the interesting letters to friends at 
home which served as first sketches for some pages of 
the essays. She had also seen her husband and the 
Edelmann Storg (the sculptor William Wetmore Story) 
with their friends act in two amateur representations 
of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and to have seen 
Lowell, in the Eternal City, taking the parts of Pyra- 
mus and Bottom must have afiforded much more 
entertainment than anybody ever got or is likely to 
get out of Lowell's writings about Italy, full of clever- 
ness though these undoubtedly are. 

It was not to be expected that when he gathered 
them into a book, Lowell would leave his articles 
precisely as they stood ten years before. On the 
whole, however, he made comparatively few changes 
of importance in "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" and 
in "A Moosehead Journal," nor in later revisions was 
anything essential added. A reference to Beowulf, a 
quotation from Fuller, may be present or absent with- 
out the average reader being the wiser or thinking of 
Lowell as much less than the widest ranger among 



XIV INTR OD UC TION. 

books and the best quoter from them to be found in 
the ranks of American men of letters. With "Leaves 
from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere" the case is 
somewhat different. The two sections entitled "At 
Sea" and "In the Mediterranean" do not appear to 
have been printed in Graham'' s, and they are not to 
be identified, at least under those titles, in Mr. Scud- 
der's bibliography. Of the remainder, about twenty- 
five pages that pleased the reader of 1864 were denied, 
for some reason or other, to the reader of 1854. 
Among the added pages were the reflections on 
"material antiquity" that close "A Few Bits of Roman 
Mosaic," the characteristically bold confession with 
regard to Michael Angelo in the same essay, and the 
amusing incident of the Italian and the dead parrot 
which he was willing to give up to the customs officer, 
not the least diverting digression in "Italy." Later, 
Lowell added a few pages and omitted one of the most 
atrocious of all his witticisms, that about Milton's 
cataract, which, however, was revived to plague the 
American poet's memory in an article devoted to him 
nearly thirty years afterwards by a noted British 
critic. We may now put bibliography behind us 
with the remark that, when he collected his essays, 
the Harvard professor was enabled to correct his 
Italian, and, in at least one case, to get rid of a false 
gender in Latin by using an equivalent EngHsh noun. 
Linguistic facility is a great blessing, but it has its 
drawbacks. 

What now is to be said in praise of a book which 
for more than forty years has charmed thousands of 



INTR OD UC TION. XV 

readers who never saw Lowell, nearly as much as it 
did the artist Story when, at the close of 1864, he read 
it in a London edition and recalled the dehghtful ex- 
cursions he had taken with its author? Certainly 
there is nothing new to say about it. The Lowell who 
had already revealed himself as a poet, a humorist, — 
there are many people who think "The Biglow 
Papers" his greatest achievement, — a lover of books, 
showed himself h.ere again in these three roles and in 
a fourth already familiar and the most natural of all, 
that of a genuinely patriotic American, who could 
appreciate what Europe had to offer without waver- 
ing in his belief that his native land was the fairest 
and most favored under the sun. This Lowell, as 
well as Lowell the brilliant journahst and editor and 
the wide-awake traveller and genial companion, had 
been known for years before "Fireside Travels" ap- 
peared, and was to be known as a favorite figure to 
Americans for many a year to come. As has been 
said, however, a book makes a different sort of im- 
pression from that produced by magazine articles, and 
it is probable that the publication of "Fireside 
Travels" did something to reveal Lowell, the essayist, 
to the world. When "Among my Books" appeared 
in 1870 and "My Study Windows" in 1872, the role 
of authoritative critic was added to that of essayist, 
and American Hterature could boast another piose 
writer of eminence. Perhaps the success of "Fire- 
side Travels" had something to do with the writing of 
"A Great Public Character," "My Garden Acquaint- 
ance," and "A Good Word for Winter," which would 



XVi INTR ODUC TION. 

not seem out of place in that volume, as well as with 
the writing of the more technically critical essays on 
Dryden and Chaucer that appeared in the later 
collections. 

So much at least we can say with safety. It is 
probably still too early to pronounce with confidence 
how much of these volumes will weather all the shocks 
of time, or how far Lowell, whose brilliance no one 
can doubt, will prove a satisfying and so a standard 
or classic writer of prose. It is hard, indeed, to 
imagine that a time will ever come when the essential 
portions of "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" — the 
pictures of the barber and the deacons and the vener- 
able artist and the old President and the Greek Pro- 
fessor crossed in love — will cease to delight. As long 
as Harvard is Harvard and New England is New Eng- 
land, and as long as men and women in other parts 
of America reverence them for the contributions they 
have made to the national life, so long, it would seem, 
will Lowell's exquisitely loyal and tenderly humorous 
pages be read with affectionate reverence. It would 
be a little rash, however, to say as much, or nearly as 
much, about the journal and the notes of the ebullient 
traveller. In 1864 they had their value. They con- 
tinued, though in a very individual fashion, the work 
begun by Irving and Cooper and Willis and Long- 
fellow and Bryant — the work of spreading before 
eager American eyes the treasures of European cul- 
ture and of opening those same eyes to the natural 
beauties of the new world itself. Lowell was a man 
of wider and richer culture, of more active imagina- 



INTR OD UC TION. XVll 

tion, of livelier fancy, and, it is needless to say, of 
more exuberant humor than any of his predecessors, 
or of his contemporaries, like Bayard Taylor and 
Curtis. But what he did in "A Moosehead Journal" 
and in his Italian notes, while it differed immensely 
in manner, did not differ essentially in purpose from 
what they had done and were doing. Their work has 
aged, mainly because a better-educated and a more 
widely travelled generation has outgrown it, or at 
least has need for new interpreters. It seems no 
treason to Lowell's memory to say that probably his 
similar work will be outgrown, if it has not been 
superseded already. Its form, sprightly and clever 
as it is, can hardly save it, for each generation has its 
own standards of sprightliness and cleverness. 

There is a point, however, that must be considered 
in this connection before we can be warranted in 
relying to any great extent upon the above line of 
reasoning. Lowell's descriptions of his experiences 
in Maine and Italy may belong to a category of litera- 
ture that speedily becomes obsolete ; but they are full 
of an element that is far from perishable and that has 
saved many a piece of writing the form and general 
substance of which seemed to doom it to destruction. 
It was not the beauties and mysteries of nature or 
the charm and power of an old civilization that 
specially riveted the eyes and stimulated the thoughts 
of Lowell the traveller. It was the men end women 
he met. Just as with "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago," 
it is the human interest of "A Moosehead Journal" 
and "Leaves from My Journal," that keeps one read- 



XVIU INTRODUCTION. 

ing them to the last page. It is Uncle Zeb, and Mr. 
X, and Leopoldo, and the stout Itahan landlady that 
stand out, with the old Cambridge worthies, when we 
have closed the book. They seem as human to us as 
they doubtless did to the magazine readers of 1854.^ 
But if they are human to us, will they not, in all proba- 
bility, be human to our grandchildren ? Probably they 
will be, to such at least of them as turn to this book 
of Lowell's; but questions of style and of the propor- 
tion of interesting to uninteresting material will enter 
into the determination of the number of readers ''Fire- 
side Travels" will have two generations hence. That, 
however, is a long time to look ahead. 

It is almost needless to say that the most interest- 
ing exhibition of human nature given in "Fireside 
Travels" is made by Lowell himself. How irresist- 
ible he is in his good spirits and his wit; how im- 
possible it is for him to check his poetic fancy, which 
suggests figures of speech altogether too numerous 
and unrestrained for the comfort of sober, decorous 
prose; how generous to a fault he is in quoting from 
the old books he loves and wishes to recommend to 
his readers. It is fortunate that "Fireside Travels" 
is not included among the classics that must be an- 
notated for the use of schools, since it would be diffi- 
cult to find editors sufficiently widely read to track 
the divagating Lowell into all his by-paths of learn- 
ing. Probably if he had quoted less, if he had for- 

Mt is a pleasure to find that Mr. Leon H. Vincent in his 
recent book, " American Literary Masters," has emphasized 
this point, which Lowell himself made at the close of "A 
Moosehead Journal." 



INTR OD UC TION. xix 

borne to drop into verse of his own composing, if he 
had ruthlessly cut out the more facile of his epigrams, 
such as "our glass of naval fashion and our mould of 
aquatic form," he might have given us a book less 
amenable to critical censure; but, then, would he 
have given us so much of his irresponsible, attractive 
self? He might easily have improved his prose style, 
yet in making it what it is now the fashion to call 
"distinguished," he might still more easily have de- 
prived it of the human, unaffected qualities that 
render it alluring to many readers, despite its technical 
imperfections. For one phrase like "the ever-renew- 
ing unassuetude" that we have to forgive, there are 
dozens that we wish to remember. We continue, after 
Lowell, to assert that "hitherto Boswell is quite as 
unique as Shakespeare." We admire the epigram- 
matic power displayed in "Morals can never be safely 
embodied in the constable," and we forget that a few 
lines lower the humor of "that model of the hospitable 
old English gentleman, Mr. Comus!" is very forced 
and thin. 

Lowell was unfortunate in this book on two occa- 
sions, when dealing with Milton, because he forgot 
that there are times when the instincts of the gentle- 
man must act as a posse to apprehend and restrain 
the lawless sallies of the wit. But, as a rule, his 
references to writers and books show what a sure 
instinct and what a sound equipment he had for 
criticism, and the independence with which he ex- 
presses his judgments is often truly comforting. He 
gives proofs of his genuine democracy, of his sym- 



XX INTR OD UC TION. 

pathy with the higher features of mediaeval civihza- 
tion, of his interest in poHtical reform, of his fine 
capacity for friendship. In short, the Lowell of the 
"Fireside Travels" is in all essential respects a large, 
genial nature full of life and imagination and culture, 
and ready to ripen into the critic, scholar, and pub- 
licist, who, in his old age, commanded the respect of 
the English-speaking world. 

W. P. Trent. 



FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 



FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 

A MEMOIR ADDRESSED TO THE EDELMANN STORG IN 
ROME, 

In those quiet old winter evenings, around our 
Roman fireside, it was not seldom, my dear Storg, 
that we talked of the advantages of travel, and in 
speeches not so long that our cigars would forget their 
fire (the measure of just conversation) debated the 
comparative advantages of the Old and New Worlds. 
You will remember how serenely I bore the imputa- 
tion of provinciaHsm, while I asserted that those 
advantages were reciprocal; that an orbed and bal- 
anced life would revolve between the Old and the 
New as opposite, but not antagonistic poles, the true 
equator lying somewhere midway between them. I 
asserted also, that there were two epochs at which 
a man might travel, — before twenty, for pure enjoy- 
ment, and after thirty, for instruction. At twenty, 
the eye is sufificiently delighted with merely seeing; 
new things are pleasant only because they are not 
old; and we take everything heartily and naturally 
in the right way, — for even mishaps are like knives, 
3 



4 . FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the 
blade or the handle. After thirty, we carry along 
our scales, with lawful weights stamped by experi- 
ence, and our chemical tests acquired by study, with 
which to ponder and assay all arts, institutions, and 
manners, and to ascertain either their absolute worth 
or their merely relative value to ourselves. On the 
whole, I declared myself in favor of the after thirty 
method, — was it partly (so difhcult is it to distin- 
guish between opinions and personalities) because I 
had tried it myself, though with scales so imperfect 
and tests so inadequate? Perhaps so, but more be- 
cause I held that a man should have travelled thor- 
oughly round himself and the great terra incognita 
just outside and inside his own threshold, before 
he undertook voyages of discovery to other worlds. 
" Far countries he can safest visit who himself is 
doughty," says Beowulf. Let him first thoroughly 
explore that strange country laid down on the maps 
as Seauton; let him look down into its craters, and 
find whether they be burnt-out or only smouldering; 
let him know between the good and evil fruits of its 
passionate tropics; let him experience how health- 
ful are its serene and high-lying table-lands; let him 
be many times driven back (till he wisely consent to 
be baffied) from its speculative northwest passages 
that lead mostly to the dreary solitudes of a sunless 
world, before he think himself morally equipped for 
travels to more distant regions. But does he com- 
monly even so much as think of this, or, while buying 
amplest trunks for his corporeal apparel, does it once 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 5 

occur to him how very small a portmanteau will 
contain all his mental and spiritual outfit? It is 
more often true that a man who could scarce be in- 
duced to expose his unclothed body even to a village 
of prairie-dogs, will complacently display a mind as 
naked as the day it was born, without so much as a 
fig-leaf of acquirement on it, in every gallery of 
Europe, — 

" Not caring, so that sumpter-horse, the back, 
Be hung with gaudy trappings, in what coarse. 
Yea, rags most beggarly, they clothe the soul." 

If not with a robe dyed in the Tyrian purple of imagi- 
native culture, if not with the close-fitting, work-day 
dress of social or business training, — at least, my 
dear Storg, one might provide himself with the merest 
waist-clout of modesty ! 

But if it be too much to expect men to traverse 
and survey themselves before they go abroad, we might 
certainly ask that they should be familiar with their 
own villages. If not even that, then it is of little 
import whither they go; and let us hope that, by 
seeing how calmly their own narrow neighborhood 
bears their departure, they may be led to think 
that the circles of disturbance set in motion by the 
fall of their tiny drop into the ocean of eternity, will 
not have a radius of more than a week in any direc- 
tion; and that the world can endure the subtraction 
of even a justice of the peace with provoking equa- 
nimity. In this way, at least, foreign travel may do 
them good, — may make them, if not wiser, at any 
rate less fussy. Is it a great way to go to school, 



6 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

and a great fee to pay for the lesson ? We cannot give 
too much for the genial stoicism which, when life flouts 
us, and says. Put that in your pipe and smoke it 1 can 
puff away with as sincere a relish as if it were tobacco 
of Mount Lebanon in a narghileh of Damascus. 

After all, my dear Storg, it is to know things that 
one has need to travel, and not men. Those force us 
to come to them, but these come to us, — sometimes 
whether we will or no. These exist for us in every 
variety in our own town. You may find your an- 
tipodes without a voyage to China; he lives there, 
just round the next corner, precise, formal, the slave of 
precedent, making all his teacups with a break in the 
edge, because his model had one, and your fancy 
decorates him with an endlessness of airy pigtail. 
There, too, are John Bull, Jean Crapaud, Hans 
Sauerkraut, Pat Murphy, and the rest. 

It has been well said: 

" He needs no ship to cross the tide, 
Who, in the lives around him, sees 
Fair window-] )rospects opening wide 
O'er history's fields on every side, 
Rome, Egypt, England, Ind, and Greece. 

" Whatever moulds of various brain 
E'er shaped tlie world to weal or woe, 
Whatever empires' wax and wane, 
To him who hath not eyes in vain, 
His village-microcosm can show." 

But things are good for nothing out of their natural 
habitat. If the heroic Barnum had succeeded in 
transplanting Shakespeare's house to America, what 
interest would it have had for us, torn out of its appro- 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. y 

priate setting in softly-hilled Warwickshire, which 
showed us that the most English of poets must be born 
in the most English of counties? I mean by a Thing 
that which is not a mere spectacle, that which some 
virtue of the mind leaps forth to, as it also sends forth 
its sympathetic flash to the mind, as soon as they come 
within each other's sphere of attraction, and, with 
instantaneous coalition, form a new product, — 
knowledge. 

Such, in the understanding it gives us of early 
Roman history, is the little territory around Rome, 
the gentis cunahula, without a sight of which Livy 
and Niebuhr and the maps are vain. So, too, 
one must go to Pompeii and the Mtiseo Borbonico, to 
get a true conception of that wondrous artistic nature 
of the Greeks, strong enough, even in that petty 
colony, to survive foreign conquest and to assimilate 
barbarian blood, showing a grace and fertility of in- 
vention whose Roman copies Rafaello himself could 
only copy, and enchanting even the base utensils of 
the kitchen with an inevitable sense of beauty to which 
we subterranean Northmen have not yet so much as 
dreamed of climbing. Mere sights one can see quite 
as well at home. Mont Blanc does not tower more 
grandly in the memory than did the dream-peak 
which loomed afar on the morning horizon of hope, 
nor did the smoke-palm of Vesuvius stand more erect 
and fair, with tapering stem and spreading top, in that 
Parthenopean air, than under the diviner sky of 
imagination. I know what Shakespeare says about 
homekeeping youths, and I can fancy what you will 



8 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

add about America being interesting only as a phe- 
nomenon, and uncomfortable to live in, because we 
have not yet done with getting ready to live. But 
is not your Europe, on the other hand, a place where 
men have done living for the present, and of value 
chiefly because of the men who had done living in it 
long ago ? And if in our rapidly-moving country one 
feel sometimes as if he had his home on a railroad 
train, is there not also a satisfaction in knowing that 
one is going jow^where? To what end visit Europe, 
if people carry with them, as most do, their old paro- 
chial horizon, going hardly as Americans even, much 
less as men ? Have we not both seen persons abroad 
who put us in mind of parlor gold-fish in their vase, 
isolated in that little globe of their own element, in- 
capable of communication with the strange world 
around them, a show themselves, while it was always 
doubtful if they could see at all beyond the limits of 
their portable prison ? The wise man travels to dis- 
cover himself; it is to find himself out that he goes 
out of himself and his habitual associations, trying 
everything in turn till he find that one activity, that 
royal standard, sovran over him by divine right, 
toward which all the disbanded powers of his nature 
and the irregular tendencies of his life gather joyfully, 
as to the common rallying-point of their loyalty. 

All these things we debated while the ilex logs upon 
the hearth burned down to tinkling coals, over which 
a gray, soft moss of ashes grew betimes, mocking the 
poor wood with a pale travesty of that green and 
gradual decay on forest-floors, its natural end. Al- 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 9 

ready the clock at the Cappuccini told the morning 
quarters, and on the pauses of our talk no sound 
intervened but the muffled hoot of an owl in the near 
convent-garden, or the rattling tramp of a patrol of 
that French army which keeps him a prisoner in his 
own city who claims to lock and unlock the doors of 
heaven. But still the discourse would eddy round 
one obstinate rocky tenet of mine, for I maintained, 
you remember, that the wisest man was he who 
stayed at home; that to see the antiquities of the Old 
World was nothing, since the youth of the world was 
really no farther away from us than our own youth; 
and that, moreover, we had also in America things 
amazingly old, as our boys, for example. Add, that 
in the end, this antiquity is a matter of comparison, 
which skips from place to place as nimbly as Emer- 
son's Sphinx, and that one old thing is good only till 
we have seen an older. England is ancient till we go 
to Rome; Etruria dethrones Rome, but only to pass 
this sceptre of antiquity which so lords it over our 
fancies to the Pelasgi, from whom Egypt straight- 
way wrenches it, to give it up in turn to older India. 
And whither then? As well rest upon the first step, 
since the effect of what is old upon the mind is single 
and positive, not cumulative. As soon as a thing is 
past, it is as infinitely far away from us as if it had 
happened millions of years ago. And if the learned 
Huet be correct, who reckoned that all human thoughts 
and records could be included in ten folios, what so 
frightfully old as we ourselves, who can, if we choose, 
hold in our memories every syllable of recorded time. 



10 FIRESIDE TRAVELS, 

from the first crunch of Eve's teeth in the apple 
downward, being thus ideally contemporary with 
hoariest Eld? 

" The pyramids built up with newer might 
To us are nothing novel, nothing strange." 

Now, my dear Storg, you know my (what the phren- 
ologists call) inhabitiveness and adhesiveness, — how 
I stand by the old thought, the old thing, the old 
place, and the old friend, till I am very sure I have 
got a better, and even then migrate painfully. Re- 
member the old Arabian story, and think how hard 
it is to pick up all the pomegranate-seeds of an oppo- 
nent's argument, and how, as long as one remains, 
you are as far from the end as ever. Since I have you 
entirely at my mercy, (for you cannot answer me under 
five weeks,) you will not be surprised at the advent of 
this letter. I had always one impregnable position, 
which was, that, however good other places might be, 
there was only one in which we could be born, and 
which therefore possessed a quite peculiar and in- 
alienable virtue. We had the fortune, which neither 
of us have had reason to call other than good, to 
journey together through the green, secluded valley 
of boyhood; together we climbed the mountain wall 
which shut in, and looked down upon, those Italian 
plains of early manhood; and, since then, we have 
met sometimes by a well, or broken bread together at 
an oasis in the arid desert of Hfe, as it truly is. With 
this letter I propose to make you my fellow-traveller 
in one of those fireside voyages which, as we grow 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. II 

older, we make oftener and oftener through our own 
past. Without leaving your elbow-chair, you shall 
go back with me thirty years, which will bring you 
among things and persons as thoroughly preterite as 
Romulus or Numa. For so rapid are our changes 
in America, that the transition from old to new, the 
shifting from habits and associations to others entirely 
different, is as rapid almost as the passing in of one 
scene and the drawing out of another on the stage. 
And it is this which makes America so interesting to 
the philosophic student of history and man. Here, 
as in a theatre, the great problems of anthropology — 
which in the Old World were ages in solving, but which 
are solved, leaving only a dry net result — are com- 
pressed, as it were, into the entertainment of a few 
hours. Here we have I know not how many epochs 
of history and phases of civilization contemporary 
with each other, nay, within five minutes of each 
other, by the electric telegraph. In two centuries we 
have seen rehearsed the dispersion of man from a 
small point over a whole continent; we witness with 
our own eyes the action of those forces which govern 
the great migration of the peoples now historical in 
Europe; we can watch the action and reaction of 
different races, forms of government, and higher or 
lower civilizations. Over there, you have only the 
dead precipitate, demanding tedious analysis; but 
here the elements are all in solution^ and we have only 
to look to know them all. History, which every day 
makes less account of governors and more of man, 
must find here the compendious key to all that picture- 



12 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

writing of the Past. Therefore it is, my dear Storg, 
that we Yankees may still esteem our America a place 
worth Hving in. But calm your apprehensions; I 
do not propose to drag you with me on such an his- 
torical circumnavigation of the globe, but only to show 
you that (however needful it may be to go abroad for 
the study of aesthetics) a man who uses the eyes of his 
heart may find here also pretty bits of what may be 
called the social picturesque, and little landscapes 
over which that Indian-summer atmosphere of the 
Past broods as sweetly and tenderly as over a Roman 
ruin. Let us look at the Cambridge of thirty years 
since. 

The seat of the oldest college in America, it had, of 
course, some of that cloistered quiet which charac- 
terizes all university towns. Even now delicately- 
thoughtful A. H. C. tells me that he finds in its intel- 
lectual atmosphere a repose which recalls that of 
grand old Oxford. But, underlying this, it had an 
idiosyncrasy of its own. Boston was not yet a city, 
and Cambridge was still a country village, with its own 
habits and traditions, not yet feeling too strongly the 
force of suburban gravitation. Approaching it from 
the west by what was then called the New Road (it is 
called so no longer, for we change our names when- 
ever we can, to the great detriment of all historical 
association), you would pause on the brow of Symonds' 
Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. 
In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lin- 
dens, and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massa- 
chusetts a colony, and were fortunately unable to 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 13 

emigrate with the Tories by whom, or by whose 
fathers, they were planted. Over it rose the noisy 
belfry of the College, the square, brown tower of the 
church, and the slim, yellow spire of the parish meet- 
ing-house, by no means ungraceful, and then an 
invariable characteristic of New England religious 
architecture. On your right, the Charles slipped 
smoothly through green and purple salt-meadows, 
darkened, here and there, with the blossoming black - 
grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. Over these 
marshes, level as water, but without its glare, and with 
softer and more soothing gradations of perspective, 
the eye was carried to a horizon of softly-rounded hills. 
To your left hand, upon the Old Road, you saw some 
half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, 
all comfortably fronting southward. If it were early 
June, the rows of horse-chestnuts along the fronts 
of these houses showed, through every crevice of their 
dark heap of foliage, and on the end of every drooping 
limb, a cone of pearly flowers, while the hill behind 
was white or rosy with the crowding blooms of various 
fruit-trees. There is no sound, unless a horseman 
clatters over the loose planks of the bridge, while his 
antipodal shadow glides silently over the mirrored 
bridge below, or unless, 

" O wingt^d rapture, feathered soul of spring, 
Blithe voice of woods, fields, waters all in one, 
Pipe blown throu<jh by the warm, mild breath of June, 
Shepherding her white flocks of woolly clouds. 
The bobolink has come, and climbs the wind 
With rippling wings that quiver not for flight, 
But only joy, or, yielding to its will. 
Runs down, a brook of laughter, through the air." 



14 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

Such was the charmingly rural picture which he 
who, thirty years ago, went eastward over Symonds' 
Hill had given him for nothing, to hang in the Gallery 
of Memory. But we are a city now and Common 
Councils have yet no notion of the truth (learned long 
ago by many a European hamlet) that picturesqueness 
adds to the actual money value of a town. To save a 
few dollars in gravel, they have cut a kind of dry ditch 
through the hill, where you suffocate with dust in sum- 
mer, or flounder through waist-deep snow-drifts in 
winter, with no prospect but the crumbling earth-walls 
on either side. The landscape was carried away 
cart-load by cart-load, and, dumped down on the 
roads, forms a part of that unfathomable pudding, 
which has, I fear, driven many a teamster and pedes- 
trian to the use of phrases not commonly found in 
English dictionaries. 

We called it "the Village" then (I speak of Old 
Cambridge), and it was essentially an English village, 
quiet, unspeculative, without enterprise, sufficing to 
itself, and only showing such differences from the 
original type as the public school and the system of 
town government might superinduce. A few houses, 
chiefly old, stood around the bare Common, with 
ample elbow-room, and old women, capped and spec- 
tacled, still peered through the same windows from 
which they had watched Lord Percy's artillery rumble 
by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome 
Virginia General who had come to wield our home- 
spun Saxon chivalry. People were still living who 
regretted the late unhappy separation from the mother 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 1 5 

island, who had seen no gentry since the Vassalls went, 
and who thought that Boston had ill kept the day of 
her patron saint, Botolph, on the 17th of June, 1775. 
The hooks were to be seen from which had swung the 
hammocks of Burgoyne's captive redcoats. If mem- 
ory does not deceive me, women still washed clothes 
in the town spring, clear as that of Bandusia. One 
coach sufficed for all the travel to the metropolis. 
Commencement had not ceased to be the great holiday 
of the Puritan Commonwealth, and a fitting one it 
was, — the festival of Santa Scholastica, whose tri 
umphal path one may conceive strewn with leaves of 
spelling-book instead of bay. The students (scholars 
they were called then) wore their sober uniform, not 
ostentatiously distinctive or capable of rousing demo- 
cratic envy, and the old lines of caste were blurred 
rather than rubbed out, as servitor was softened into 
beneficiary. The Spanish king was sure that the 
gesticulating student was either mad or reading Don 
Quixote, and if, in those days, you met a youth swing- 
ing his arms and talking to himself, you might conclude 
that he was either a lunatic or one who was to appear 
in a "part" at the next Commencement. A favorite 
place for the rehearsal of these orations was the re- 
tired amphitheatre of the Gravel-pit, perched unre- 
garded on whose dizzy edge, I have heard many a 
burst of plusquam Ciceronian eloquence, and (often 
repeated) the regular saluto vos, prastantissimcB, etc., 
which every year (with a glance at the gallery) causes 
a flutter among the fans innocent of Latin, and delights 
to applauses of conscious superiority the youth almost 



1 6 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

as innocent as they. It is curious, by the way, to note 
how plainly one can feel the pulse of self in the plaudits 
of an audience. At a political meeting, if the enthu- 
siasm of the lieges hang fire, it may be exploded at 
once by an allusion to their intelligence or patriotism ; 
and at a literary festival, the first Latin quotation 
draws the first applause, the clapping of hands being 
intended as a tribute to our own familiarity with that 
sonorous tongue, and not at all as an approval of the 
particular sentiment conveyed in it. For if the orator 
should say, "Well has Tacitus remarked, Americani 
omnes quddani vi natura jurcd dignissimi,''^ it would 
be all the same. But the Gravel-pit was patient, if 
irresponsive; nor did the declaimer always fail to 
bring down the house, bits of loosened earth falling 
now and then from the precipitous walls, their cohe- 
sion perhaps overcome by the vibrations of the voice, 
and happily satirizing the effect of most popular dis- 
courses, which prevail rather with the earthy than the 
spiritual part of the hearer. Was it possible for us 
in those days to conceive of a greater potentate than 
the President of the University, in his square doctor's 
cap, that still filially recalled Oxford and Cambridge ? 
If there was a doubt, it was suggested only by the 
Governor, and even by him on artillery-election days 
alone, superbly martial with epaulets and buckskin 
breeches, and bestriding the war-horse, promoted to 
that solemn duty for his tameness and steady habits. 
Thirty years ago, the town had indeed a character. 
Railways and omnibuses had not rolled flat all little 
social prominences and pecuHarities, making every 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 1/ 

man as much a citizen everywhere as at home. No 
Charlestown boy could come to our annual festival 
without fighting to avenge a certain traditional porcine 
imputation against the inhabitants of that historic 
locality, and to which our youth gave vent in fanciful 
imitations of the dialect of the sty, or derisive shouts 
of "Charlestown hogs!" The penny newspaper had 
not yet silenced the tripod of the barber, oracle of 
news. Everybody knew everybody, and all about 
everybody, and village wit, whose high 'change was 
around the little market-house in the town square, 
had labelled every more marked individuality with 
nicknames that clung like burs. Things were estab- 
lished then, and men did not run though all the fig 
ures on the dial of society so swiftly as now, when 
hurry and competition seem to have quite unhung 
the modulating pendulum of steady thrift and compe- 
tent training. Some slow-minded persons even fol 
lowed their father's trade, — a humiliating spectacle, 
rarer every day. We had our established loafers, 
topers, proverb-mongers, barber, parson, nay, post- 
master, whose tenure was for life. The great political 
engine did not then come down at regular quadrennial 
intervals, like a nail-cutting machine, to make all 
official lives of a standard length, and to generate lazy 
and intriguing expectancy. Life flowed in recog- 
nized channels, narrower perhaps, but with all the 
more individuality and force. 

There was but one white-and-yellow-washer, whose 
own cottage, fresh-gleaming every June through 
grape-vine and creeper, was his only sign and adver- 



1 8 FIRESIDE TRAVELS, 

tiscment. He was said to possess a secret, which died 
with him Hke that of Luca della Robbia, and certainly 
conceived all colors but white and yellow to savor of 
savagery, civilizing the stems of his trees annually with 
liquid lime, and meditating how to extend that candent 
baptism even to the leaves. His pie-plants (the best 
in town), compulsory monastics, blanched under bar- 
rels, each in his little hermitage, a vegetable Certosa. 
His fowls, his ducks, his geese, could not show so much 
as a gray feather among them, and he would have 
given a year's earnings for a white peacock. The 
flowers which decked his little door-yard were whitest 
China-asters and goldenest sunflowers, which last, 
backsliding from their traditional Parsee faith, used 
to puzzle us urchins not a little by staring brazenly 
every way except towards the sun. Celery, too, he 
raised, whose virtue is its paleness, and the silvery 
onion, and turnip, which, though outwardly conform- 
ing to the green heresies of summer, nourish a purer 
faith subterraneously, like early Christians in the 
catacombs. In an obscure corner grew the sanguine 
beet, tolerated only for its usefulness in allaying the 
asperities of Saturday's salt-fish. He loved winter 
better than summer, because Nature then played the 
whitewasher, and challenged with her snows the 
scarce inferior purity of his overalls and neck-cloth. 
I fancy that he never rightly liked Commencement, 
for bringing so many black coats together. He 
founded no school. Others might essay his art and 
were allowed to try their prentice hands on fences an 1 
the like coarse subjects, but the ceiling of every house- 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 1 9 

wife waited on the leisure of Newman {ichneumon 
the students called him for his diminutiveness), nor 
would consent to other brush than his. There was 
also but one brewer, — Lewis, who made the village 
beer, both spruce and ginger, a grave and amiable 
Ethiopian, making a discount always to the boys, and 
wisely, for they were his chiefest patrons. He wheeled 
his whole stock in a white-roofed handcart, on whose 
front a sign-board presented at either end an insur- 
rectionary bottle; yet insurgent after no mad Gallic 
fashion, but soberly and Saxonly discharging itself 
into the restraining formulary of a tumbler, symbolic 
of orderly prescription. The artist had struggled 
manfully with the difficulties of his subject, but had 
not succeeded so well that we did not often debate in 
which of the twin bottles Spruce was typified, and in 
which Ginger. We always believed that Lewis men- 
tally distinguished between them, but by some pecul- 
iarity occult to exoteric eyes. This ambulatory chapel 
of the Bacchus that gives the colic, but not inebriates, 
only appeared at the Commencement holidays, and the 
lad who bought of Lewis laid out his money well, 
getting respect as well as beer, three sirs to every glass, 
— "Beer, sir? yes, sir: spruce or ginger, sir?" I 
can yet recall the innocent pride with which I walked 
away after that somewhat risky ceremony, (for a 
bottle sometimes blew up,) dilated not alone with car- 
bonic-acid gas, but with the more ethereal fixed air 
of that titular flattery. Nor was Lewis proud. When 
he tried his fortunes in the capital on Election-days, 
and stood amid a row of rival venders in the very 



20 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

flood of custom, he never forgot his small fellow- 
citizens, but welcomed them with an assuring smile, 
and served them with the first. 

The barber's shop was a museum, scarce second to 
the larger one of Greenwood in the metropohs. The 
boy who was to be clipped there was always accom- 
panied to the sacrifice by troops of friends, who thus 
inspected the curiosities gratis. While the watchful 
eye of R. wandered to keep in check these rather un- 
scrupulous explorers the unpausing shears would 
sometimes overstep the boundaries of strict tonsorial 
prescription, and make a notch through which the 
phrenological developments could be distinctly seen. 
As Michael Angelo's design was modified by the 
shape of his block, so R., rigid in artistic proprieties, 
would contrive to give an appearance of design to this 
aberration, by making it the key-note to his work, and 
reducing the whole head to an appearance of prema- 
ture baldness. What a charming place it was, — 
how full of wonder and delight! The sunny little 
room, fronting southwest upon the Common, rang 
with canaries and Java sparrows, nor were the familiar 
notes of robin, thrush, and bobolink wanting. A 
large white cockatoo harangued vaguely, at intervals, 
in what we believed (on R.'s authority) to be the 
Hottentot language. He had an unveracious air, but 
what inventions of former grandeur he was indulging 
in, what sweet South-African Argos he was remem- 
bering, what tropical heats and giant trees by uncon- 
jectured rivers, known only to the wallowing hippo- 
potamus, we could only guess at. The walls were 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 21 

covered with curious old Dutch prints, beaks of alba- 
tross and penguin, and whales' teeth fantastically 
engraved. There v^as Frederick the Great, with head 
drooped plottingly, and keen side-long glance from 
under the three-cornered hat. There hung Bona- 
parte, too, the long-haired, haggard general of Italy, 
his eyes sombre with prefigured destiny; and there 
was his island grave ; — the dream and the fulfilment. 
Good store of sea-fights there was also; above all, 
Paul Jones in the Bonhomme Richard: the smoke 
rolling courteously to leeward, that we might see him 
dealing thunderous wreck to the two hostile vessels, 
each twice as large as his own, and the reality of the 
scene corroborated by streaks of red paint leaping from 
the mouth of every gun. Suspended over the fire- 
place, with the curling-tongs, were an Indian bow and 
arrows, and in the corners of the room stood New 
Zealand paddles and war-clubs, quaintly carved. The 
model of a ship in glass we variously estimated to be 
worth from a hundred to a thousand dollars, R. 
rather favoring the higher valuation, though never 
distinctly committing himself. Among these wonders, 
the only suspicious one was an Indian tomahawk, 
which had too much the peaceful look of a shingling- 
hatchet. Did any rarity enter the town, it gravitated 
naturally to these walls, to the very nail that waited to 
receive it, and where, the day after its accession, it 
seemed to have hung a lifetime. We always had 
a theory that R. was immensely rich, (how could he 
possess so much and be otherwi.se?) and that he pur- 
sued his calling from an amiable eccentricity. He 



22 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

was a conscientious artist, and never submitted it to 
the choice of his victim whether he would be perfumed 
or not. Faithfully was the bottle shaken and the 
odoriferous mixture rubbed in, a fact redolent to the 
whole school-room in the afternoon. Sometimes the 
persuasive tonsor would impress one of the attendant 
volunteers, and reduce his poll to shoe-brush crisp- 
ness, at cost of the reluctant ninepence hoarded for 
Fresh Pond and the next half-holiday. So purely 
indigenous was our population then, that R. had a 
certain exotic charm, a kind of game flavor, by being 
a Dutchman. 

Shall the two groceries want their vales sacer, where 
E. & W. I. goods and country prodooce were sold 
with an energy mitigated by the quiet genius of the 
place, and where strings of urchins waited, each with 
cent in hand, for the unweighed dates (thus giving an 
ordinary business transaction all the excitement of a 
lottery), and buying, not only that cloying sweetness, 
but a dream also of Egypt, and palm-trees, and Arabs, 
in which vision a print of the Pyramids in our geog- 
raphy tyrannized like that taller thought of Cowper's? 

At one of these the unwearied students used to ply 
a joke handed down from class to class. Enter A, 
and asks gravely, "Have you any sour apples. 
Deacon?" 

"Well, no, I have n't any just now that are exactly 
sour; but there 's the bell-flower apple, and folks that 
like a sour apple generally like that." {Exit A.) 

Enter B. "Have you any sweet apples, Deacon?" 

"Well, no, I have n't any just now that are exactly 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 23 

sweet; but there's the bell-flower apple, and folks 

that like a sweet apple generally like that." {Exit B.) 

There is not even a tradition of any one's ever 

having turned the wary Deacon's flank and his 

Laodicean apples persisted to the end, neither one 

thing nor another. Or shall the two town-constables 

be forgotten, in whom the law stood worthily and 

amply embodied, fit either of them to fill the uniform 

of an English beadle? Grim and silent as Ninevite 

statues they stood on each side of the meeting-house 

door at Commencement, propped by long staves of 

blue and red, on which the Indian with bow and arrow 

and the mailed arm with the sword, hinted at the 

invisible sovereignty of the state ready to reinforce 

them, as 

" For Achilles' portrait stood a spear 
Grasped in an armed hand." 

Stalwart and rubicund men they were, second only, 
if second, to S., champion of the county, and not in- 
capable of genial unbendings when the fasces were 
laid aside. One of them still survives in octogenarian 
vigor, the Herodotus of village and college legend, and 
may it be long ere he depart, to carry with him the 
pattern of a courtesy, now, alas ! old-fashioned, but 
which might profitably make part of the instruction 
of our youth among the other humanities! Long 
may R. M. be spared to us, so genial, so courtly, the 
last man among us who will ever know how to lift a hat 
with the nice graduation of social distinction ! Some- 
thing of a Jeremiah now, he bewails the decline of our 
manners. **My children," he says, "say, 'Yes sir,' 



24 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

and 'No sir'; my grandchildren, 'Yes' and 'No'; 
and I am every day expecting to hear *D — n your 
eyes!' for an answer when I ask a service of my 
great-grandchildren. Why, sir, I can remember 
when more respect was paid to Governor Hancock's 
lackey at Commencement, than the Governor and all 
his suite get now." M. is one of those invaluable 
men who remember your grandfather, and value you 
accordingly. 

In those days the population was almost wholly 
without foreign admixture. Two Scotch gardeners 
there were, — Rule, whose daughter (glimpsed per- 
haps at church, or possibly the mere Miss Harris of 
fancy) the students nicknamed Anarchy or Miss Rule, 
— and later Fraser, whom whiskey sublimed into a 
poet, full of bloody histories of the Forty-twa, and 
showing an imaginary French bullet, sometimes in 
one leg, sometimes in the other, and sometimes, 
toward nightfall, in both. With this claim to military 
distinction he adroitly contrived to mingle another to a 
natural one, asserting double teeth all round his jaws, 
and, having thus created two sets of doubts, silenced 
both at once by a single demonstration, displaying 
the grinders to the confusion of the infidel. 

The old court-house stood then upon the square. 
It has shrunk back out of sight now, and students box 
and fence where Parsons once laid down the law, 
and Ames and Dexter showed their skill in the fence 
of argument. Times have changed, and manners, 
since Chief Justice Dana (father of Richard the First, 
and grandfather of Richard the Second) caused to be 



CAMBRIDGE rillRTY YEARS AGO. 25 

arrested for contempt of court a butcher who had 
come in without a coat to witness the administration 
of his country's laws, and who thus had his curiosity 
exemplarily gratified. Times have chan(];ed also 
since the cellar beneath it was tenanted by the twin- 
brothers Snow. Oyster men were they indeed, 
silent in their subterranean burrow, and taking the 
ebbs and flows of custom with bivalvian serenity. 
Careless of the months with an R in them, the maxim 
of Snow (for we knew them but as a unit) was, ''When, 
'ysters are good, they air good; and when they ain't, 
they is w'/." Grecian F. (may his shadow never be 
less !) tells this, his great laugh expected all the while 
from deep vaults of chest, and then coming in at the 
close, hearty, contagious, mounting with the meas- 
ured tread of a jovial but stately butler who brings 
ancientest good-fellowship from exhaustless bins, 
and enough, without other sauce, to give a flavor of 
stalled ox to a dinner of herbs. Let me preserve here 
an anticipatory elegy upon the Snows, written years 
ago by some nameless college rhymer. 

DIFFUGERE NIVES. 

Here lies, or lie, — decide the question, you, 

If they were two in one or one in two, — 

P. & S. Snow, whose memory shall not fade. 

Castor and Pollux of the oyster-trade : 

Hatched from one egg, at once the shell they burst, 

(The last, perhaps, a P. S. to the first,) 

So homoousian both in look and soul, 

So undiscernibly a single whole, 

That whether P. was S., or S. was P., 

Surpassed all skill in etymology; 

One kept the shop at once, and all we know 



26 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 



Is that together they were the Great Snow, 

A snow not deep, yet with a crust so thick 

It never melted to the son of Tick ; 

Perpetual ? nay, our region was too low. 

Too warm, too southern, for perpetual Snow; 

Still, like fair Leda's sons, to whom 't was given 

To take their turns in Hades and in Heaven, 

Our new Dioscuri would bravely share 

The cellar's darkness and the upper air; 

Twice every year would each the shades escape, 

And, like a sea-bird, seek the wave-washed Cape, 

Where (Rumor voiced) one spouse sufficed for both; 

No bigamist, for she upon her oath. 

Unskilled m letters, could not make a guess 

At any difference twixt P. and S. — 

A thing not marvellous, since Fame agrees 

They were as little different as two peas, 

And she, like Paris, when his Helen laid 

Her hand 'mid snows from Ida's top conveyed 

To cool their wine of Chios, could not know, 

Between those rival candors, which was Snow. 

Whiche'er behind the counter chanced to be 

Oped oysters oft, his clam-shells seldom he ; 

It e'er he laughed, 't was with no loud guffaw, 

The fun warmed through him with a gradual thaw; 

The nicer shades of wit were not his gift. 

Nor was it hard to sound Snow's simple drift; 

His were plain jokes, that many a time before 

Had set his tarry messmates in a roar. 

When floundering cod beslimed the deck's wet planks, 

The humorous specie of Newfoundland banks. 

But Snow is gone, and, let us hope, sleeps well, 
Buried (his last breath asked it) in a shell ; 
Fate with an oyster-knife sawed off his thread, 
And planted him upon his latest bed. 

Him on the Stygian shore my fancy sees 
Noting choice shoals for oyster colonies, 
Or, at a board stuck full of ghostly forks, 
Opening for practice visionary Yorks. 
And whither he has gone, may we too go, — 
Since no hot place were fit for keeping Snow I 



Jam satis nivis. 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 2 J 

Cambridge has long had its port, but the greater part 
of its maritime trade was, thirty years ago, intrusted 
to a single Argo, the sloop Harvard, which belonged 
to the College, and made annual voyages to that vague 
Orient known as Down East, bringing back wood 
that, in those days, gave to winter life at Harvard a 
crackle and a cheerfulness, for the loss of which the 
greater warmth of anthracite hardly compensates. 
New England life, to be genuine, must have in it some 
sentiment of the sea, — it was this instinct that printed 
the device of the pine-tree on the old money and the 
old flag, — and these periodic ventures of the sloop 
Harvard made the old Viking fibre vibrate in the 
hearts of all the village boys. What a vista of mystery 
and adventure did her sailing open to us ! With what 
pride did we hail her return ! She was our scholiast 
upon Robinson Crusoe and the mutiny of the Bounty. 
Her captain still lords it over our memories, the greatest 
sailor that ever sailed the seas, and we should not 
look at Sir John Franklin himself with such admiring 
interest as that with which we enhaloed some larger 
boy who had made a voyage in her, and had come 
back without braces {gallowses we called them) to his 
trousers, and squirting ostentatiously the juice of that 
weed which still gave him little private returns of 
something very like sea-sickness. All our shingle 
vessels were shaped and rigged by her, who was our 
glass of naval fashion and our mould of aquatic form. 
We had a secret and wild delight in believing that 
she carried a gun, and imagined her sending grape and 
canister among the treacherous savages of Oldtown. 



28 FIRESIDE TRAVEIS. 

Inspired by her were those first essays at navigation 
on the Winthrop duck -pond, of the plucky boy who 
was afterwards to serve two famous years before the 
mast. The greater part of what is now Cambridge 
port was then (in the native dialect) a huckleberry 
pastur. Woods were not wanting on its outskirts, of 
pine, and oak, and maple, and the rarer tupelo with 
downward limbs. Its veins did not draw their bloo I 
from the quiet old heart of the village, but it had a 
distinct being of its own, and was rather a great cara- 
vansary than a suburb. The chief feature of the 
place was its inns, of which there were five, with vast 
barns and court -yards, which the railroad was to make 
as silent and deserted as the palaces of Nimroud. 
Great white-topped wagons, each drawn by double 
files of six or eight horses, with its dusty bucket swing- 
ing from the hinder axle, and its grim bull-dog trotting 
silent underneath, or in midsummer panting on the 
lofty perch beside the driver, (how elevated thither 
bafiled conjecture,) brought all the wares and products 
of the country to their mart and seaport in Boston. 
These filled the inn -yards, or were ranged side by 
side under broad-roofed sheds, and far into the night 
the mirth of their lusty drivers clamored from the red- 
curtained bar-room, while the single lantern, swaying 
to and fro in the black cavern of the stables, made a 
Rembrandt of the group of ostlers and horses below. 
There were, besides the taverns, some huge square 
stores where groceries were sold, some houses, by 
whom or why inhabited was to us boys a problem, 
and, on the edge of the marsh, a currier's shop, where 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 29 

at high tide, on a floating platform, men were always 
beating skins in a way to remind one of Don Quixote's 
fulling mills. Nor did these make all the Port. As 
there is always a Coming Man who never comes, so 
there is a man who always comes (it may be only a 
quarter of an hour) too early. This man, so far as the 
Port is concerned, was Rufus Davenport. Looking 
at the marshy flats of Cambridge, and considering 
their nearness to Boston, he resolved that there should 
grow up a suburban Venice. Accordingly, the 
marshes were bought, canals were dug, ample for the 
commerce of both Indies, and four or five rows of 
brick houses were built to meet the first wants of the 
wading settlers who were expected to rush in — 
WHENCE? This singular question had never occurred 
to the enthusiastic projector. There are laws which 
govern human migrations quite beyond the control 
of the speculator, as many a man with desirable 
building-lots has discovered to his cost. Why mortal 
men will pay more for a chess-board square in that 
swamp, than for an acre on the breezy upland close 
by, who shall say? And again, why, having shown 
such a passion for your swamp, they are so coy of 
mine^ who shall say? Not certainly any one who, 
like Davenport, had got up too early for his genera- 
tion. If we could only carry that slow, imperturbable 
old clock of Opportunity, that never strikes a second 
too soon or too late, in our fobs, and push the hands 
forward as we can those of our watches! With a 
foreseeing economy of space which now seems ludi- 
crous, the roofs of this forlorn-hope of houses were 



30 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

made flat, that the swarming population might have 
where to dry their clothes. But A.u.c. 30 showed 
the same view as a.u.c. i, — only that the brick 
blocks looked as if they had been struck by a malaria. 
The dull weed upholstered the decaying wharves, and 
the only freight that heaped them was the kelp and 
eel grass left by higher floods. Instead of a Venice, 
behold a Torzelo ! The unfortunate projector took 
to the last refuge of the unhappy — book-making, 
and bored the reluctant public with what he called a 
right-aim Testament, prefaced by a recommendation 
from General Jackson, who perhaps, from its title, 
took it for some treatise on ball -practice. 

But even Cambridgeport, my dear Storg, did not 
want associations poetic and venerable. The stranger 
who took the "Hourly" at Old Cambridge, if he were 
a physiognomist and student of character, might per- 
haps have had his curiosity excited by a person who 
mounted the coach at the Port. So refined was his 
whole appearance, so fastidiously neat his apparel, — 
but with a neatness that seemed less the result of care 
and plan, than a something as proper to the man as 
whiteness to the lily, — that you would have at once 
classed him with those individuals, rarer than great 
captains and almost as rare as great poets, whom 
Nature sends into the world to fill the arduous office 
of Gentleman. Were you ever emperor of that 
Barataria which under your peaceful sceptre would 
present, of course, a model of government, this re 
markable person should be Duke of Bienseance and 
Master of Ceremonies. There are some men whom 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 3 1 

destiny has endowed with the faculty of external neat- 
ness, whose clothes are repellent of dust and mud, 
whose unwithering white neck-cloths persevere to the 
day's end, unappeasably seeing the sun go down upon 
their starch, and whose linen makes you fancy them 
heirs in the maternal line to the instincts of all the 
washerwomen from Eve downward. There are 
others whose inward natures possess this fatal clean- 
ness, incapable of moral dirt spot. You are not long 
in discovering that the stranger combines in himself 
both these properties. A nimbus of hair, fine as an 
infant's, and early white, showing refinement of organ- 
ization and the predominance of the spiritual over the 
physical, undulated and floated around a face that 
seemed like pale flame, and over which the flitting 
shades of expression chased each other, fugitive and 
gleaming as waves upon a field of rye. It was a 
countenance that, without any beauty of feature, was 
very beautiful. I have said that it looked like pale 
flame, and can find no other words for the impression 
it gave. Here was a man all soul, whose body seemed 
a lamp of finest clay, whose service was to feed with 
magic oils, rare and fragrant, that wavering fire which 
hovered over it. You, who are an adept in such mat- 
ters, would have detected in the eyes that artist-look 
which seems to see pictures ever in the air, and 
which, if it fall on you, makes you feel as if all 
the world were a gallery, and yourself the rather 
indifferent Portrait of a Gentleman hung therein. 
As the stranger brushes by you in alighting, you 
detect a single incongruity, — a smell of dead tobacco- 



32 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

smoke. You ask his name, and the answer is, 
"Mr. Allston." 

"Mr. Allston!" and you resolve to note down at 
once in your diary every look, every gesture, every 
word of the great painter? Not in the least. You 
have the true Anglo-Norman indifference, and most 
likely never think of him again till you hear that one 
of his pictures has sold for a great price, and then 
contrive to let your grandchildren know twice a week 
that you met him once in a coach, and that he said, 
"Excuse me, sir," in a very Titianesque manner, when 
he stumbled over your toes in getting out. Hitherto 
Boswell is quite as unique as Shakespeare. The 
country-gentleman, journeying up to London, in- 
quires of Mistress Davenant at the Oxford inn the 
name of his pleasant companion of the night before. 
"Master Shakespeare, an 't please your worship." 
And the Justice, not without a sense of the unbending, 
says, "Truly, a merry and conceited gentleman !" It 
is lucky for the peace of great men that the world 
seldom finds out contemporaneously who its great 
men are, or, perhaps, that each man esteems himself 
the fortunate he who shall draw the lot of memory 
from the helmet of the future. Had the eyes of some 
Stratford burgess been achromatic telescopes, capable 
of a perspective of two hundred years! But, even 
then, would not his record have been fuller of says Vs 
than says he's? Nevertheless, it is curious to con- 
sider from what infinitely varied points of view we 
might form our estimate of a great man's character, 
when we remember that he had his points of contact 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 33 

with the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick- 
maker, as well as with the ingenious A, the sublime 
B, and the Right Honorable C. If it be true that no 
man ever clean forgets everything, and that the act 
of drowning (as is asserted) forthwith brightens up all 
those o'er-rusted impressions, would it not be a curious 
experiment, if, after a remarkable person's death, the 
public, eager for minutest particulars, should gather 
together all who had ever been brought into relations 
with him, and, submerging them to the hair's-breadth 
hitherward of the drowning-point, subject them to 
strict cross-examination by the Humane Society, as 
soon as they become conscious between the resusci- 
tating blankets? All of us probably have brushed 
against destiny in the street, have shaken hands with 
it, fallen asleep with it in railway carriages, and knocked 
heads with it in some one or other of its yet unrecog- 
nized incarnations. 

Will it seem like presenting a tract to a colporteur, 
my dear Storg, if I say a word or two about an artist 
to you over there in Italy? Be patient, and leave 
your button in my grasp yet a litde longer. A person 
whose opinion is worth having once said to me, that, 
however one's notions might be modified by going to 
Europe, one always came back with a higher esteem 
for Allston. Certainly he is thus far the greatest 
English painter of historical subjects. And only con- 
sider how strong must have been the artistic bias in 
him, to have made him a painter at all under the cir- 
cumstances. There were no traditions of art, so 
necessary for guidance and inspiration. Blackburn, 



34 FIRESIDE TRAVEIS. 

Smibert, Copley, Trumbull, Stuart, — it was, after 
all, but a Brentford sceptre which their heirs could 
aspire to, and theirs were not names to conjure with, 
like those from which Fame, as through a silver trum- 
pet, had blown for three centuries. Copley and 
Stuart were both remarkable men; but the one 
painted like an inspired silk mercer, and the other 
seems to have mixed his colors with the claret of which 
he and his generation were so fond. And what could a 
successful artist hope for, at that time, beyond the 
mere wages of his work ? His picture would hang in 
cramped back parlors, between deadly cross-fires of 
lights, sure of the garret or the auction -room erelong, 
in a country where the nomad population carry no 
household gods with them but their five wits and 
their ten fingers. As a race, we care nothing about 
Art; but the Puritan and the Quaker are the only 
Englishmen who have had pluck enough to confess it. 
If it were surprising that AUston should have become 
a painter at all, how almost miraculous that he should 
have been a great and original one ! We call him 
original deliberately, because, though his school is 
essentially Italian, it is of less consequence where a 
man buys his tools than v/hat use he makes of them. 
Enough English artists went to Italy and came back 
painting history in a very Anglo-Saxon manner, and 
creating a school as melodramatic as the French, 
without its perfection in technicalities. But Allston 
carried thither a nature open on the southern side, 
and brought it back so steeped in rich Italian sun- 
shine that the east winds (whether physical or intel- 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 35 

lectual) of Boston and the dusts of Cambridgeport 
assailed it in vain. To that bare wooden studio one 
might go to breathe Venetian air, and, better yet, 
the very spirit wherein the elder brothers of Art 
labored, etherealized by metaphysical speculation, 
and sublimed by religious fervor. The beautiful old 
man ! Here was genius with no volcanic explosions 
(the mechanic result of vulgar gunpowder often), 
but lovely as a Lapland night; here was fame, not 
sought after nor worn in any cheap French fashion as 
a ribbon at the button-hole, but so gentle, so retiring, 
that it seemed no more than an assured and em- 
boldened modesty; here was ambition, undebased by 
rivalry and incapable of the sidelong look; and all 
these massed and harmonized together into a purity 
and depth of character, into a tone, which made the 
daily life of the man the greatest masterpiece of the 
artist. 

But let us go back to the Old Town. Thirty years 
since, the Muster and the Cornwallis allowed some 
vent to those natural instincts which Puritanism 
scotched, but not killed. The Cornwallis had entered 
upon the estates of the old Guy-Fawkes procession, 
confiscated by the Revolution. It was a masquerade, 
in which that grave and suppressed humor, of which 
the Yankees are fuller than other people, burst through 
all restraints, and disported itself in all the wildest 
vagaries of fun. Commonly the Yankee in his pleas- 
ures suspects the presence of Public Opinion as a 
detective, and accordingly is apt to pinion himself 
in his Sunday suit. It is a curious commentary on 



36 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

the artificiality of our lives, that men must be dis- 
guised and masked before they will venture into the 
obscurer corners of their individuality, and display the 
true features of their nature. One remarked it in 
the Carnival, and one especially noted it here among 
a race naturally self-restrained; for Silas and Ezra 
and Jonas were not only disguised as Redcoats, Con- 
tinentals, and ladians, but not unfrequently disguised 
in drink also. It is a question whether the Lyceum 
where the public is obliged to comprehend all vagrom 
men, supplies the place of the old popular amuse- 
ments. A hundred and fifty years ago, Cotton Mather 
bewails the carnal attractions of the tavern and the 
training-field, and tells of an old Indian who imper- 
fectly understood the Enghsh tongue, but desperately 
mastered enough of it (when under sentence of death) 
to express a desire for instant hemp rather than listen 
to any more ghostly consolations. Puritanism — I 
am perfectly aware how great a debt we owe it — tried 
over again the old experiment of driving out nature 
with a pitchfork, and had the usual success. It was 
like a ship inwardly on fire, whose hatches must be 
kept hermetically battened down ; for the admittance 
of an ounce of Heaven's own natural air would ex- 
plode it utterly. Morals can never be safely embodied 
in the constable. Polished, cultivated, fascinating 
Mephistopheles ! it is for the ungovernable breakings- 
away of the soul from unnatural compressions that 
thou waitest with a deprecatory smile. Then it is 
that thou offerest thy gentlemanly arm to unguarded 
youth for a pleasant stroll through the City of De- 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 37 

struction, and, as a special favor, introducest him 
to the bewitching Miss Circe, and to that model 
of the hospitable old English gentleman, Mr. 
Comus ! 

But the Muster and the Cornwallis were not 
peculiar to Cambridge. Commencement-day was. 
Saint Pedagogus was a worthy whose feast could be 
celebrated by men who quarrelled with minced-pies, 
and blasphemed custard through the nose. The 
holiday preserved all the features of an English fair. 
Stations were marked out beforehand by the town 
constables, and distinguished by numbered stakes. 
These were assigned to the different venders of small 
wares and exhibitors of rarities, whose canvas booths, 
beginning at the market-place, sometimes half en- 
circled the Common with their jovial embrace. Now 
all the Jehoiada-boxes in town were forced to give 
up their rattling deposits of specie, if not through the 
legitimate orifice, then to the brute force of the ham- 
mer. For hither were come all the wonders of the 
world, making the Arabian Nights seem possible, and 
which we beheld for half price; not without min- 
gled emotions, — pleasure at the economy, and shame 
at not paying the more manly fee. Here the mummy 
unveiled her withered charms, — a more marvellous 
Ninon, still attractive in her three-thousandth year. 
Here were the Siamese twins ; ah ! if all such forced 
and unnatural unions were made a show of! Here 
were the flying horses (their supernatural effect in- 
jured — like that of some poems — by the visibility 
of the man who turned the crank), on which, as we 



38 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

tilted at the ring, we felt our shoulders tingle with the 
accolade, and heard the clink of golden spurs at our 
heels. Are the realities of life ever worth half so 
much as its cheats? And are there any feasts half so 
filling at the price as those Barmecide ones spread 
for us by Imagination? Hither came the Canadian 
giant, surreptitiously seen, without price, as he 
alighted, in broad day, (giants were always foolish,) 
at the tavern. Hither came the great horse Columbus, 
with shoes two inches thick, and more wisely intro- 
duced by night. In the trough of the town-pump 
might be seen the mermaid, its poor monkey's head 
carefully sustained above water, to keep it from drown- 
ing. There were dwarfs, also, who danced and sang, 
and many a proprietor regretted the transaudient 
properties of canvas, which allowed the frugal public 
to share in the melody without entering the booth. Is 
it a slander of J. H., who reports that he once saw a 
deacon, eminent for psalmody, Hngering near one of 
those vocal tents, and, with an assumed air of abstrac- 
tion, furtively drinking in, with unhabitual ears, a 
song, not secular merely, but with a dash of libertin- 
ism? The New England proverb says, "All deacons 
are good, but — there 's odds in deacons." On these 
days Snow became superterranean, and had a stand 
in the square, and Lewis temperately contended with 
the stronger fascinations of egg-pop. But space 
would fail me to make a catalogue of everything. 
No doubt, Wisdom also, as usual, had her quiet booth 
at the corner of some street, without entrance-fee, 
and, even at that rate, got never a customer the whole 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 39 

day long. For the bankrupt afternoon there were 
peep-shows, at a cent each. 

But all these shows and their showmen are as clean 
gone now as those of Caesar and Timour and Napo- 
leon, for which the world paid dearer. They are 
utterly gone out, not leaving so much as a snuff be- 
hind, — as little thought of now as that John Robins, 
who was once so considerable a phenomenon as to be 
esteemed the last great Antichrist and son of perdi- 
tion by the entire sect of Muggletonians. Were 
Commencement what it used to be, I should be 
tempted to take a booth myself, and try an experi- 
ment recommended by a satirist of some merit, whose 
works were long ago dead and (I fear) deedeed to 
boot. 

" Menenius, thou who fain wouldst know how calmly men can 

pass 
Those biting portraits of themselves, disguised as fox or 

ass, — 
Go borrow coin enough to buy a full-length psyche-glass, 
Eng.ige a rather darkish room in some well-sought position 
And let the town break out with bills, so much per head 

admission, — 
Great natural curiosity! ! The biggest living 

fool! ! 
Arranije your mirror cleverly, before it set a stool. 
Admit the public one by one, place each upon the seat. 
Draw up the curtain, let him look his fill and then retreat. 
Smith mounts and takes a thorough view, then comes 

serenely down. 
Goes home and tells his wife the thing is curiously like 

Brown ; 
Brown goes and stares, and tells his wife the wonder's core 

and pith 
Is that "t is just the counterpart of that conceited Smith, 
Life calls us all to such a show : Menenius, trust in me, 
While thou to see thy neighbor smil'st, he does the same 

for thee." 



40 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

My dear Storg, would you come to my show, and, 
instead of looking in my glass, insist on taking your 
money's worth in staring at the exhibitor? 

Not least among the curiosities which the day 
brought together were some of the graduates, pos- 
thumous men, as it were, disentombed from country 
parishes and district schools, but perennial also, in 
whom freshly survived all the college jokes, and who 
had no intelligence later than their Senior year. 
These had gathered to eat the College dinner, and to 
get the Triennial Catalogue (their lihro d'oro), re- 
ferred to oftener than any volume but the Concordance. 
Aspiring men they were certainly, but in a right un- 
worldly way ; this scholastic festival opening a peace- 
ful path to the ambition which might else have devas- 
tated mankind with Prolusions on the Pentateuch, 
or Genealogies of the Dormouse Family. For since 
in the academic processions the classes are ranked in 
the order of their graduation, and he has the best 
chance at the dinner who has the fewest teeth to eat 
it with, so, by degrees, there springs up a competition 
in longevity, — the prize contended for being the 
oldest surviving graduateship. This is an office, it 
is true, without emolument, but having certain ad- 
vantages, nevertheless. The incumbent, if he come 
to Commencement, is a prodigious lion, and com- 
monly gets a paragraph in the newspapers once a 
year with the (fiftieth) last survivor of Washington's 
Life-Guard. If a clergyman, he is expected to ask 
a blessing and return thanks at the dinner, a function 
which he performs with centenarian longanimity, as 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 4 1 

if he reckoned the ordinary life of man to be fivescore 
years, and that a grace must be long to reach so far 
away as heaven. Accordingly, this silent race is 
watched, on the course of the Catalogue, with an 
interest worthy of Newmarket ; and as star after star 
rises in the galaxy of death, till one name is left alone, 
an oasis of Hfe in the stellar desert, it grows solemn. 
The natural feeling is reversed, and it is the solitary 
life that becomes sad and monitory, the Stylites there 
on the lonely top of his century-pillar, who has heard 
the passing-bell of youth, love, friendship, hope, — 
of everything but immitigable eld. 

Dr. K. was President of the University then, a man 
of genius, but of genius that evaded utilization, — a 
great water-power, but without rapids, and flowing 
with too smooth and gentle a current to be set turning 
wheels and whirling spindles. His was not that rest- 
less genius of which the man seems to be merely the 
representative, and which wreaks itself in literature or 
poHtics, but of that milder sort, quite as genuine, and 
perhaps of more contemporaneous value, which is 
the man, permeating the whole life with placid force, 
and giving to word, look, and gesture a meaning only 
justifiable by our belief in a reserved power of latent 
reinforcement. The man of talents possesses them 
like so many tools, does his job with them, and there 
an end ; but the man of genius is possessed by it, and 
it makes him into a book or a life according to its 
whim. Talent takes the existing moulds, and makes 
its castings, better or worse, of richer or baser metal, 
according to knack and opportunity; but genius is 



42 FIRESIDE TRAVEIS. 

always shaping new ones, and runs the man in them, 
so that there is always that human feel in its results 
which gives us a kindred thrill. What it will make, 
we can only conjecture, contented always with know- 
ing the infinite balance of possibility against which it 
can draw at pleasure. Have you ever seen a man 
whose check would be honored for a million pay his 
toll of one cent? and has not that bit of copper, no 
bigger than your own, and piled with it by the careless 
toll-man, given you a tingling vision of what golden 
bridges he could pass, — into what Elysian regions of 
taste and enjoyment and culture, barred to the rest 
of us? Something like it is the impression made by 
such characters as K.'s on those who come in contact 
with them. 

There was that in the soft and rounded (I had 
almost said melting) outlines of his face which re- 
minded one of Chaucer. The head had a placid yet 
dignified droop like his. He was an anachronism, 
fitter to have been Abbot of Fountains or Bishop 
Golias, courtier and priest, humorist and lord spiritual, 
all in one, than for the mastership of a provincial 
college, which combined, with its purely scholastic 
functions, those of accountant and chief of police. 
For keeping books he was incompetent (unless it were 
those he borrowed), and the only discipline he exer- 
cised was by the unobtrusive pressure of a gentle- 
manliness which rendered insubordination to him 
impossible. But the world always judges a man 
(and rightly enough, too) by his little faults, which he 
shows a hundred times a day, rather than by his great 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 43 

virtues, which he discloses perhaps but once in a Hfe- 
time, and to a single person, — nay, in proportion as 
they are rarer, and he is nobler, is shyer of letting their 
existence be known at all. He was one of those mis- 
placed persons whose misfortune it is that their lives 
overlap two distinct eras, and are already so impreg- 
nated with one that they can never be in healthy sym- 
pathy with the other. Born when the New England 
clergy were still an establishment and an aristocracy, 
and when office was almost always for life, and often 
hereditary, he lived to be thrown upon a time when 
avocations of all colors might be shuffled together in 
the life of one man, like a pack of cards, so that you 
could not prophesy that he who was ordained to-day 
might not accept a colonelcy of filibusters to-morrow. 
Such temperaments as his attach themselves, like 
barnacles, to what seems permanent; but presently 
the good ship Progress weighs anchor, and whirls 
them away from drowsy tropic inlets to arctic waters 
of unnatural ice. To such crustaceous natures, 
created to cling upon the immemorial rock amid 
softest mosses, comes the bustling Nineteenth Century 
and says, "Come, come, bestir yourself and be prac- 
tical! get out of that old shell of yours forthwith!" 
Alas ! to get out of the shell is to die ! 

One of the old travellers in South America tells of 
fishes that built their nests in trees {piscium et summa 
hcBsit genus nlmo), and gives a print of the mother fish 
upon her nest, while her mate mounts perpendicularly 
to her without aid of legs or wings. Life shows plenty 
of such incongruities between a man's place and his 



44 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

nature, (not so easily got over as by the traveller's 
undoubting engraver,) and one cannot help fancying 
that K. was an instance in point. He never en- 
countered, one would say, the attraction proper to 
draw out his native force. Certainly, few men who 
impressed others so strongly, and of whom so many 
good things are remembered, left less behind them to 
justify contemporary estimates. He printed nothing, 
and was, perhaps, one of those the electric sparkles 
of whose brains, discharged naturally and healthily 
in conversation, refuse to pass through the noncon- 
ducting medium of the inkstand. His ana would 
make a delightful collection. One or two of his official 
ones will be in place here. Hearing that Porter's flip 
(which was exemplary) had too great an attraction 
for the collegians, he resolved to investigate the matter 
himself. Accordingly, entering the old inn one day, 
he called for a mug of it, and, having drunk it, said, 
"And so, Mr. Porter, the young gentlemen come to 
drink your flip, do they?" "Yes, sir, — sometimes." 
"Ah, well, I should think they would. Good day, 
Mr. Porter," and departed, saying nothing more; for 
he always wisely allowed for the existence of a certain 
amount of human nature in ingenuous youth. At 
another time the "Harvard Washington" asked leave 
to go into Boston to a collation which had been offered 
them. "Certainly, young gentlemen," said the Presi- 
dent, "but have you engaged any one to bring home 
your muskets?" — the College being responsible for 
these weapons, which belonged to the State. Again, 
when a student came with a physician's certificate, 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 45 

and asked leave of absence, K. granted it at once, and 
then added, "By the way, Mr. , persons inter- 
ested in the relation which exists between states of the 
atmosphere and health have noticed a curious fact in 
regard to the climate of Cambridge, especially within 
the College limits, — the very small number of deaths 
in proportion to the cases of dangerous illness." This 
is told of Judge W., himself a wit, and capable of en- 
joying the humorous delicacy of the reproof. 

Shall I take Brahmin x\lcott's favorite word, and 
call him a daemonic man? No, the Latin genius is 
quite old-fashioned enough for me, means the same 
thing, and its derivative geniality expresses, moreover, 
the base of K.'s being. How he suggested cloistered 
repose, and quadrangles mossy with centurial asso- 
ciations ! How easy he was, and how without creak 
was every movement of his mind ! This life was good 
enough for him, and the next not too good. The 
gentleman -like pervaded even his prayers. His were 
not the manners of a man of the world, nor of a man 
of the other world either; but both met in him to 
balance each other in a beautiful equilibrium. Pray- 
ing, he leaned forward upon the pulpit-cushion as for 
conversation, and seemed to feel himself (without 
irreverence) on terms of friendly but courteous, 
familiarity with Heaven. The expression of his face 
was that of tranquil contentment, and he appeared 
less to be supplicating expected mercies than thankful 
for those already found, — as if he were saying the 
gratias in the refectory of the Abbey of Theleme. 
Under him flourished the Harvard Washington Corps, 



46 FIRESIDE TRAVEIS. 

whose gyrating banner, inscribed Tarn Marti quant 
Mercurio {atqui magis LycEO should have been added), 
on the evening of training-days was an accurate 
dynamometer of Willard's punch or Porter's flip. 
It was they who, after being royally entertained by a 
maiden lady of the town, entered in their orderly book 
a vote that Miss Blank was a gentleman. I see them 
now, returning from the imminent deadly breach of 
the law of Rechab, unable to form other than the ser- 
pentine line of beauty, while their officers, brotherly 
rather than imperious, instead of reprimanding, tear, 
fully embraced the more eccentric wanderers from 
military precision. Under him the Med. Facs. took 
their equal place among the learned societies of 
Europe, numbering among their grateful honorary 
members, Alexander, Emperor of all the Russias, who 
(if College legends may be trusted) sent them in 
return for their diploma a gift of medals confiscated 
by the authorities. Under him the College fire- 
engine was vigilant and active in suppressing any 
tendency to spontaneous combustion among the 
Freshmen, or rushed wildly to imaginary confla- 
grations, generally in a direction where punch was to 
be had. All these useful conductors for the natural 
electricity of youth, dispersing it or turning it harm- 
lessly into the earth, are taken away now, — wisely 
or not, is questionable. 

An academic town, in whose atmosphere there is 
always something antiseptic, seems naturally to draw 
to itself certain varieties and to preserve certain 
humors (in the Ben Jonsonian sense) of character, — 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 4/ 

men who come not to study so much as to be studied. 
At the head-quarters of Washington once, and now 

of the Muses, hved C , but before the date of these 

recollections. Here for seven years (as the law was 
then) he made his house his castle, sunning himself 
in his elbow-chair at the front-door, on that seventh 
day, secure from every arrest but Death's. Here long 
survived him his turbaned widow, studious only of 
Spinoza, and refusing to molest the canker-worms 
that annually disleaved her elms, because we were all 
vermicular alike. She had been a famous beauty 
once, but the canker years had left her leafless, too; 
and I used to wonder, as I saw her sitting always alone 
at her accustomed window, whether she were ever 
visited by the reproachful shade of him who (in spite 
of Rosalind) died broken-hearted for her in her 
radiant youth. 

And this reminds me of J. F., who, also crossed in 
love, allowed no mortal eye to behold his face for many 
years. The eremitic instinct is not peculiar to the 
Thebais, as many a New England village can testify; 
and it is worthy of consideration that the Romish 
Church has not forgotten this among her other points 
of intimate contact with human nature. F. became 
purely vespertinal, never stirring abroad till after dark. 
He occupied two rooms, migrating from one to the 
other, as the necessities of housewifery demanded, 
thus shunning all sight of womankind, and being 
practically more solitary in his dual apartment than 
Montaigne's Dean of St. Hilaire in his single one. 
When it was requisite that he should put his signature 



48 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

to any legal instrument, (for he was an anchorite of 
ample means,) he wrapped himself in a blanket, allow- 
ing nothing to be seen but the hand which acted as 
scribe. What impressed us boys more than any- 
thing else was the rumor that he had suffered his beard 
to grow, — such an anti-Sheffieldism being almost 
unheard of in those days, and the peculiar ornament 
of man being associated in our minds with nothing 
more recent than the patriarchs and apostles, whose 
effigies we were obliged to solace ourselves with weekly 
in the Family Bible. He came out of his oysterhood 
at last, and I knew him well, a kind-hearted man, who 
gave annual sleigh-rides to the town-paupers, and 
supphed the poor children with school-books. His 
favorite topic of conversation was Eternity, and, like 
many other worthy persons he used to fancy t!iat 
meaning was an affair of aggregation, and that he 
doubled the intensity of what he said by the sole aid 
of the multiplication -table. "Eternity!" he used to 
say, "it is not a day; it is not a year; it is not a hun- 
dred years; it is not a thousand years; it is not a 
million years; no, sir," (the sir being thrown in to 
recall wandering attention,) "it is not ten million 
years!" and so on, his enthusiasm becoming a mere 
frenzy when he got among his sextillions, till I some- 
times wished he had continued in retirement. He 
used to sit at the open window during thunder-storms, 
and had a Grecian feeling about death by lightning. 
In a certain sense he had his desire, for he died sud- 
denly, — not by fire from heaven, but by the red flash 
of apoplexy, leaving his whole estate to charitable uses. 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 49 

If K. were out of place as President, that was not 
P. as Greek Professor. Who that ever saw him can 
forget him, in his old age, like a lusty winter, frosty 
but kindly, with great silver spectacles of the heroic 
period, such as scarce twelve noses of these degen- 
erate days could bear? He was a natural celibate, 
not dwelling "like the fly in the heart of the apple," 
but like a lonely bee rather, absconding himself in 
Hymettian flowers, incapable of matrimony as a soli- 
tary palm-tree. There was, to be sure, a tradition of 
youthful disappointment, and a touching story which 

L. told me perhaps confirms it. When Mrs. 

died, a carriage with blinds drawn followed the funeral 
train at some distance, and, when the coffin had been 
lowered into the grave, drove hastily away to escape 
that saddest of earthly sounds, the first rattle of earth 
upon the lid. It was afterwards known that the car- 
riage held a single mourner, — our grim and un- 
demonstrative Professor. Yet I cannot bring myself 
to suppose him susceptible to any tender passion after 
that single lapse in the immaturity of reason. He 
might have joined the Abderites in singing their mad 
chorus from the Andromeda; but it would have been 
in deference to the language merely, and with a silent 
protest against the sentiment. I fancy him arrang- 
ing his scrupulous toilet, not for Amaryllis or Neaera, 
but, like Machiavelli, for the society of his beloved 
classics. His ears had needed no prophylactic wax 
to pass the Sirens' isle ; nay, he would have kept them 
the wider open, studious of the dialect in which they 
sang, and perhaps triumphantly detecting the ^olic 



50 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

digamma in their lay. A thoroughly single man, single- 
minded, single-hearted, buttoning over his single 
heart a single-breasted surtout, and wearing always a 
hat of a single fashion, — did he in secret regard the 
dual number of his favorite language as a weakness? 
The son of an ofiicer of distinction in the Revolutionary 
War, he mounted the pulpit with the erect port of a 
soldier, and carried his cane more in the fashion of a 
weapon than a staff, but with the point lowered, in 
token of surrender to the peaceful proprieties of his 
calling. Yet sometimes the martial instincts would 
burst the cerements of black coat and clerical neck- 
cloth, as once, when the students had got into a fight 
upon the training-field, and the licentious soldiery, 
furious with rum, had driven them at point of bayonet, 
to the College gates, and even threatened to hft their 
arms against the Muses' bower. Then, like Major 
Goflfe at Deerfield, suddenly appeared the gray- 
haired P., all his father resurgent in him, and shouted: 
"Now, my lads, stand your ground, you 're in the 
right now ! Don't let one of them set foot within the 
College grounds!" Thus he allowed arms to get 
the better of the toga, but raised it, like the Prophet's 
breeches, into a banner, and carefully ushered re- 
sistance with a preamble of infringed right. Fidelity 
was his strong characteristic, and burned equably in 
him through a life of eighty-three years. He drilled 
himself till inflexible habit stood sentinel before all 
those postern-weaknesses which temperament leaves 
unbolted to temptation. A lover of the scholar's herb 
yet loving freedom more, and knowing that the animal 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. $1 

appetites ever hold one hand behind them for Satan 
to drop a bribe in, he would never have two cigars in 
his house at once, but walked every day to the shop 
to fetch his single diurnal solace. Nor would he 
trust himself with two on Saturdays, preferring (since 
he could not violate the Sabbath even by that infini- 
tesimal traffic) to depend on Providential ravens, 
which were seldom wanting in the shape of some 
black-coated friend who knew his need, and honored 
the scruple that occasioned it. He was faithful, also, 
to his old hats, in which appeared the constant service 
of the antique world, and which he preserved forever, 
piled like a black pagoda under his dressing-table. 
No scarecrow was ever the residuary legatee of his 
beavers, though one of them in any of the neighboring 
peach-orchards would have been sovereign against 
an attack of Freshmen. He wore them all in turn, 
getting though all in the course of the year, like the 
sun through the signs of the zodiac, modulating them 
according to seasons and celestial phenomena, so that 
never was spider-web or chickweed so sensitive a 
weather-gauge as they. Nor did his political party 
find him less loyal. Taking all the tickets, he would 
seat himself apart, and carefully compare them with 
the list of regular nominations as printed in his Daily 
Advertiser, before he dropped his ballot in the box. 
In less ambitious moments, it almost seems to me 
that I would rather have had that slow, conscientious 
vote of P.'s alone, than to have been chosen Alderman 
of the Ward ! 
. If you had walked to what was then Sweet Auburn 



52 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

by the pleasant Old Road, on some June morning 
thirty years ago, you would very likely have met two 
other characteristic persons, both phantasmagoric 
now, and belonging to the past. Fifty years earlier, 
the scarlet-coated, rapiered figures of Vassall, Lech- 
mere, Oliver, and Brattle creaked up and down there 
on red-heeled shoes, lifting the ceremonious three- 
cornered hat, and ofifering the fugacious hospitalities 
of the snuff-box. They are all shadowy alike now, 
not one of your Etruscan Lucumos or Roman Consuls 
more so, my dear Storg. First is W., his queue slender 
and tapering, like the tail of a violet crab, held out 
horizontally by the high collar of his shepherd's-gray 
overcoat, whose style was of the latest when he studied 
at Leyden in his hot youth. The age of cheap clothes 
sees no more of those faithful old garments, as proper 
to their wearers and as distinctive as the barks of 
trees, and by long use interpenetrated with their very 
nature. Nor do we see so many Humors (still in the 
old sense) now that every man's soul belongs to the 
Public, as when social distinctions were more marked, 
and men felt that their personalities were their castles, 
in which they could intrench themselves against the 
world. Nowadays men are shy of letting their true 
selves be seen, as if in some former life they had com- 
mitted a crime, and were all the time afraid of dis- 
covery and arrest in this. Formerly they used to 
insist on your giving the wall to their peculiarities, and 
you may still find examples of it in the parson or the 
doctor of retired villages. One of W.'s oddities was 
touching. A little brook used to run across the street, 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 53 

and the sidewalk was carried over it by a broad stone. 
Of course there is no brook now. What use did that 
httle gUmpse of a ripple serve, where the children used 
to launch their chip fleets? W., in going over this 
stone, which gave a hollow resonance to the tread, 
had a trick of striking upon it three times with his 
cane, and muttering, "Tom, Tom, Tom!" I used 
to think he was only mimicking with his voice the 
sound of the blows, and possibly it was that sound 
which suggested his thought, for he was remembering 
a favorite nephew, prematurely dead. Perhaps Tom 
had sailed his boats there; perhaps the reverberation 
under the old man's foot hinted at the hollowness of 
life ; perhaps the fleeting eddies of the water brought 
to mind the jiigaces annos. W., like P., wore amazing 
spectacles, fit to transmit no smaller image than the 
page of mightiest folios of Dioscorides or Hercules de 
Saxonia, and rising full-disked upon the beholder 
like those prodigies of two moons at once, portending 
change to monarchs. The great collar disallowing 
any independent rotation of the head, I remember he 
used to turn his whole person in order to bring their 
joci to bear upon an object. One can fancy that 
terrified nature would have yielded up her secrets at 
once, without cross-examination, at their first glaje. 
Through them he had gazed fondly into the great 
mare's-nest of Junius, publishing his observations 
upon the eggs found therein in a tall octavo. It v/as 
he who introduced vaccination to this Western World. 
Malicious persons disputing his claim to this distinc- 
tion, he published this advertisement: "Lost, a gold 



54 FIRESIDE TRAVEIS. 

snuff-box, with the inscription, 'The Jenner of the 
Old World to the Jenner of the New.' Whoever shall 
return the same to Dr. shall be suitably re- 
warded." It was never returned. Would the search 
after it have been as fruitless as that of the alchemist 
after his equally imaginary gold? Mahcious persons 
persisted in believing the box as visionary as the claim 
it was meant to buttress with a semblance of reality. 
He used to stop and say good morning kindly, and pat 
the shoulder of the blushing school-boy who now, 
with the fierce snow-storm wildering without, sits 
and remembers sadly those old meetings and partings 
in the June sunshine. 

Then there was S., whose resounding ''Haw, haw, 
haw! by George!" positively enlarged the income 
of every dweller in Cambridge. In downright, honest 
good cheer and good neighborhood, it was worth five 
hundred a year to every one of us. Its jovial thunders 
cleared the mental air of every sulky cloud. Perpetual 
childhood dwelt in him, the childhood of his native 
Southern France, and its fixed air was all the time 
bubbling up and sparkling and winking in his eyes. 
It seemed as if his placid old face were only a mask 
behind which a merry Cupid had ambushed himself, 
peeping out all the while, and ready to drop it when 
the play grew tiresome. Every word he uttered 
seemed to be hilarious, no matter what the occasion. 
If he were sick, and you visited him, if he had met 
with a misfortune, (and there are few men so wise 
that they can look even at the back of a retiring sor- 
row with composure,) it was all one; his great laugh 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 55 

went off as if it were set like an alarm-clock, to run 
down, whether he would or no, at a certain tick. 
Even after an ordinary Good morning! (especially 
if to an old pupil, and in French,) the wonderful Haw, 
haw, haw! hy George! would burst upon you unex- 
pectedly, like a salute of artillery on some holiday 
which you had forgotten. Everything was a joke to 
him, — that the oath of allegiance had been admin- 
istered to him by your grandfather, — that he had 
taught Prescott his first Spanish (of which he was 
proud), — no matter' what. Everything came to 
him marked by Nature Right side up, with care, and 
he kept it so. The world to him, as to all of us, was 
like a medal, on the obverse of which is stamped the 
image of Joy, and on the reverse that of Care. S. 
never took the foolish pains to look at that other side, 
even -if he knew its existence ; much less would it have 
occurred to him to turn it into view, and insist that his 
friends should look at it with him. Nor was this a 
mere outside good-humor; its source was deeper, in 
a true Christian kindliness and amenity. Once, when 
he had been knocked down by a tipsily-driven sleigh, 
and was urged to prosecute the offenders, "No, no," 
he said, his wounds still fresh, "young blood, young 
blood! it must have its way; I was young myself." 
Was! few men come into life so young as S. went out. 
He landed in Boston (then the front door of America) 
in '93, and, in honor of the ceremony, had his head 
powdered afresh, and put on a suit of court-mourning 
before he set foot on the wharf. My fancy always 
dressed him in that violet silk, and his soul certainly 



56 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

wore a full court-suit. What was there ever like his 
bow? It was as if you had received a decoration, 
and could write yourself gentleman from that day 
forth. His hat rose, regreeting your own, and, having 
sailed through the stately curve of the old regime, 
sank gently back over that placid brain, which har- 
bored no thought less white than the powder which 
covered it. I have sometimes imagined that there 
was a graduated arc over his head, invisible to other 
eyes than his, by which he meted out to each his right- 
ful share of castorial consideration. I carry in my 
memory three exemplary bows. The first is that of 
an old beggar, who, already carrying in his hand a 
white hat, the gift of benevolence, took off the black 
one from his head also, and profoundly saluted me 
with both at once, giving me, in return for my alms, 
a dual benediction, puzzling as a nod from Janus 
Bifrons. The second I received from an old Cardinal, 
who was taking his walk just outside the Porta San 
Giovanni at Rome. I paid him the courtesy due to 
his age and rank. Forthwith rose, first, the Hat; 
second, the hat of his confessor ; third, that of another 
priest who attended him; fourth, the fringed cocked- 
hat of his coachman; fifth and sixth, the ditto, ditto, 
of his two footmen. Here was an investment, 
indeed; six hundred per cent interest on a single 
bow ! The third bow, worthy to be noted in 
one's almanac among the other mirahilia, was that 
of S., in which courtesy had mounted to the 
last round of her ladder, — and tried to draw it up 
after her. 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 57 

But the genial veteran is gone even while I am 
writing this, and I will play Old Mortality no longer. 
Wandering among these recent graves, my dear friend, 

we may chance upon ; but no, I will not end my 

sentence. I bid you heartily farewell! 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

ADDRESSED TO THE EDELMANN STORG AT THE 
BAGNI DI LUCCA. 

Thursday, nth August. — I knew as little yester- 
day of the interior of Maine as the least penetrating 
person knows of the inside of that great social mill- 
stone which, driven by the river Time, sets impera- 
tively agoing the several wheels of our individual 
activities. Born while Maine was still a province of 
native Massachusetts, I was as much a foreigner to it 
as yourself, my dear Storg. I had seen many lakes, 
ranging from that of Virgil's Cumaean to that of Scott's 
Caledonian Lady; but Moosehead, within two days 
of me, had never enjoyed the profit of being mirrored 
in my retina. At the sound of the name, no remi- 
niscential atoms (according to Kenelm Digby's 
Theory of Association, — as good as any) stirred and 
marshalled themselves in my brain. The truth is, 
we think lightly of Nature's penny shows, and esti- 
mate what we see by the cost of the ticket. Em- 
pedocles gave his life for a pit-entrance to iEtna, and 
no doubt found his account in it. Accordingly, the 
clean face of Cousin Bull is imaged patronizingly in 
Lake George, and Loch Lomond glasses the hurried 
countenance of Jonathan, diving deeper in the streams 
of European association (and coming up drier) than 
58 



A MiOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 59 

any other man. Or is the cause of our not caring to 
see what is equally within the reach of all our neigh- 
bors to be sought in that aristocratic principle so 
deeply implanted in human nature ? I knew a pauper 
graduate who always borrowed a black coat, and came 
to eat the Commencement dinner, — not that it was 
better than the one which daily graced the board of 
the public institution in which he hibernated (so to 
speak) during the other three hundred and sixty-four 
days of the year, save in this one particular, that none 
of his eleemosynary fellow-commoners could eat it. 
If there are unhappy men who wish that they were as 
the Babe Unborn, there are more who w^ould aspire 
to the lonely distinction of being that other figurative 
personage, the Oldest Inhabitant. You remember 
the charming irresolution of our dear Esthwaite, (like 
Macheath between his two doxies,) divided between 
his theory that he is under thirty, and his pride at 
being the only one of us who witnessed the September 
gale and the rejoicings at the Peace ? Nineteen years 
ago I was walking through the Franconia Notch, and 
stopped to chat with a hermit, who fed with gradual 
logs the unwearied teeth of a saw-mill. As the pant- 
ing steel slit off the slahs of the log, so did the less 
willing machine of talk, acquiring a steadier up-and- 
down motion, pare away that outward bark of con- 
versation which protects the core, and which, like 
other bark, has naturally most to do with the weather, 
the season, and the heat of the day. At length I asked 
him the best point of view for the Old Man of the 
Mountain. 



6o FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

"Dunno, — never see it." 

Too young and too happy either to feel or affect the 
JuvenaUan indifference, I was sincerely astonished, 
and I expressed it. 

The log-compelling man attempted no justifica- 
tion, but after a Httle asked, "Come from Bawsn?" 

''Yes" (with peninsular pride). 

"Goodie to see in the vycinity o' Bawsn." 

"O yes!" I said, and I thought, — see Boston 
and die ! see the State-Houses, old and new, the cat- 
erpillar wooden bridges crawling with innumerable 
legs across the flats of Charles ; see the Common, — 
largest park, doubtless, in the world, — with its files 
of trees planted as if by a drill-sergeant, and then for 
your nunc dimittis ! 

"I should like, 'awl, I should like to stan' on Bunker 
Hill. You've ben there offen, likely?" 

"N — o — o," unwillingly, seeing the little end of 
the horn in clear vision at the terminus of this Socratic 
perspective. 

'"Awl, my young frien', you've larned neow thet 
wut a man kin see any day for nawthin', childern half 
price, he never doos see. Nawthin' pay, nawthin' 
vally." 

With inis modern instance of a wise saw, I departed, 
deeply revolving these things with myself, and con- 
vinced that, whatever the ratio of population, the 
average amount of human nature to the square mile 
is the same the world over. I thought of it when I 
saw people upon the Pincian wondering at the Al- 
chemist sun, as if he never burned the leaden clouds 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 6 1 

to gold in sight of Charles Street. I thought of it when 
I found eyes first discovering at Mont Blanc how 
beautiful snow was. As I walked on, I said to myself. 
There is one exception, wise hermit, — it is just these 
gratis pictures which the poet puts in his show-box, 
and which we all gladly pay Wordsworth and the rest 
for a peep at. The divine faculty is to see what every- 
body can look at. 

While every well-informed man in Europe, from 
the barber down to the diplomatist, has his view of 
the Eastern Question, why should I not go personally 
down East and see for myself? Why not, like Tan- 
cred, attempt my own solution of the mystery of the 
Orient, — doubly mysterious when you begin the two 
words with capitals? You know my way of doing 
things, to let them simmer in my mind gently for 
months, and at last do them impromptu in a kind of 
desperation, driven by the Eumenides of unfulfilled 
purpose. So, after talking about Moosehead till 
nobody believed me capable of going thither, I found 
myself at the Eastern Railway station. The only 
event of the journey hither (I am now at Waterville) 
was a boy hawking exhilaratingly the last great rail- 
road smash, — thirteen lives lost, — and no doubt 
devoutly wishing there had been fifty. This having 
a mercantile interest in horrors, holding stock, as it 
were, in murder, misfortune, and pestilence, must 
have an odd eiTect on the human mind. The birds of 
ill-omen, at whose sombre flight the rest of the world 
turn pale, are the ravens which bring food to this 
little outcast in the wilderness. If this lad give 



62 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

thanks for daily bread, it would be curious to inquire 
what that phrase represents to his understanding. If 
there ever be a plum in it, it is Sin or Death that puts 
it in. Other details of my dreadful ride I will spare 
you. Suffice it that I arrived here in safety, — in 
complexion like an Ethiopian serenader half got-up, 
and so broiled and peppered that I was more like a 
devilled kidney than anything else I can think of. 

lo P.M. — The civil landlord and neat chamber at 
the "Elmwood House" were very grateful, and after 
tea I set forth to explore the town. It has a good 
chance of being pretty ; but, like most American 
towns, it is in a hobbledehoy age, growing yet, and 
one cannot tell what may happen. A child with 
great promise of beauty is often spoiled by its second 
teeth. There is something agreeable in the sense of 
completeness which a walled town gives one. It is 
entire, like a crystal, — a work which man has suc- 
ceeded in finishing. I think the human mind pines 
more or less where everything is new, and is better for 
a diet of stale bread. The number of Americans who 
visit the Old World is beginning to afford matter of 
speculation to observant Europeans, and the deep 
inspirations with which they breathe the air of an- 
tiquity, as if their mental lungs had been starved with 
too thin an atmosphere. For my own part, I never 
saw a house which I thought old enough to be torn 
down. It is too like that Scythian fashion of knock- 
ing old people on the head. I cannot help thinking 
that the indefinable something which we call char- 
acter is cumulative, — that the influence of the same 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 63 

climate, scenery, and associations for several genera- 
tions is necessary to its gathering head, and that the 
process is disturbed by continual change of place. 
The American is nomadic in religion, in ideas, in 
morals, and leaves his faith and opinions with as 
much indifference as the house in which he was born. 
However, we need not bother: Nature takes care 
not to leave out of the great heart of society either of 
its two ventricles of hold-back and go-ahead. 

It seems as if every considerable American town 
must have its one specimen of everything, and so there 
is a college in Waterville, the buildings of which are 
three in number, of brick, and quite up to the average 
ugliness which seems essential in edifices of this de- 
scription. Unhappily, they do not reach that extreme 
of ugliness where it and beauty come together in the 
clasp of fascination. We erect handsomer factories, 
for cottons, woollens, and steam-engines, than for 
doctors, lawyers, and parsons. The truth is, that, 
till our struggle with nature is over, till this shaggy 
hemisphere is tamed and subjugated, the workshop 
will be the college whose degrees will be most valued. 
Moreover, steam has made travel so easy that the 
great university of the world is open to all comers, and 
the old cloister system is falling astern. Perhaps it is 
only the more needed, and, were I rich, I should like to 
found a few lazyships in my Alma Mater as a kind of 
counterpoise. The Anglo-Saxon race has accepted 
the primal curse as a blessing, has deified work, and 
would not have thanked Adam for abstaining from 
the apple. They would have dammed the four rivers 



64 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

of Paradise, substituted cotton for fig-leaves among 
the antediluvian populations, and commended man's 
first disobedience as a wise measure of political 
economy. But to return to our college. We cannot 
have fine buildings till we are less in a hurry. We 
snatch an education like a meal at a railroad-station. 
Just in time to make us dyspeptic, the whistle shrieks, 
and we must rush, or lose our places in the great train 
of life. Yet noble architecture is one element of 
patriotism, and an eminent one of culture, the finer 
portions of which are taken in by unconscious ab- 
sorption through the pores of the mind from the 
surrounding atmosphere. I suppose we must wait, 
for we are a great bivouac as yet rather than a nation, 
— on the march from the Atlantic to the Pacific, — 
and pitch tents instead of building houses. Our 
very villages seem to be in motion, following west- 
ward the bewitching music of some Pied Piper of 
Hamelin. We still feel the great push toward sun- 
down given to the peoples somewhere in the gray 
dawn of history. The cliff-swallow alone of all ani- 
mated nature emigrates eastward. 

Friday, 12th. — The coach leaves Waterville at 
five o'clock in the morning, and one must breakfast 
in the dark at a quarter past four, because a train 
starts at twenty minutes before five, — the passengers 
by both conveyances being pastured gregariously. 
So one must be up at half past three. The primary 
geological formations contain no trace of man, and 
it seems to me that these eocene periods of the day 
are not fitted for sustaining the human forms of life. 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 6$ 

One of the Fathers held that the sun was created to be 
worshipped at his rising by the Gentiles. The more 
reason that Christians (except, perhaps, early Chris- 
tians) should abstain from these heathenish cere- 
monials. As one arriving by an early train is wel- 
comed by a drowsy maid with the sleep scarce brushed 
out of her hair, and finds empty grates and polished 
mahogany, on whose arid plains the pioneers of break- 
fast have not yet encamped, so a person waked thus 
unseasonably is sent into the world before his faculties 
are up and dressed to serve him. It might have been 
for this reason that my stomach resented for several 
hours a piece of fried beefsteak which I forced upon 
it, or, more properly speaking, a piece of that leathern 
conveniency which in these regions assumes the name. 
You will find it as hard to believe, my dear Storg, as 
that quarrel of the Sorbonists, whether one should 
say ego amat or no, that the use of the gridiron is un- 
known hereabout, and so near a river named after 
St. Lawrence, too ! 

To-day has been the hottest day of the season, yet 
our drive has not been unpleasant. For a consider- 
able distance we followed the course of the Sebasti- 
cook River, a pretty stream with alternations of dark 
brown pools and wine-colored rapids. On each side 
of the road the land has been cleared, and little one- 
story farm-houses were scattered at intervals. But 
the stumps still held out in most of the fields, and the 
tangled wilderness closed in behind, striped here and 
there with the slim white trunks of the elm. As yet 
only the edges of the great forest have been nibbled 



66 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

away. Sometimes a root-fence stretched up its 
bleaching antlers, Hke the trophies of a giant hunter. 
Now and then the houses thickened into an unsocial- 
looking village, and we drove up to the grocery to 
leave and take a mail-bag, stopping again presently 
to water the horses at some pallid little tavern, whose 
one red-curtained eye (the bar-room) had been put 
out by the inexorable thrust of Maine Law. Had 
Shenstone travelled this road, he would never have 
written that famous stanza of his; had Johnson, he 
would never have quoted it. They are to real inns 
as the skull of Yorick to his face. Where these vil- 
lages occurred at a distance from the river, it was 
difficult to account for them. On the river-bank, a 
saw-mill or a tannery served as a logical premise, and 
saved them from total inconsequentiality. As we 
trailed along, at the rate of about four miles an hour, 
it was discovered that one of our mail-bags was miss- 
ing. "Guess somebody '11 pick it up," said the 
driver coolly: '"t any rate, likely there's nothin' in 
it." Who knows how long it took some Elam D. 
or Zebulon K. to compose the missive intrusted to 
that vagrant bag, and how much longer to persuade 
Pamela Grace or Sophronia Melissa that it had really 
and truly been written? The discovery of our loss 
was made by at all man who sat next to me on the top 
of the coach, every one of whose senses seemed to be 
prosecuting its several investigation as we went along. 
Presently, sniffing gently, he remarked: '"Pears to 
me 's though I smelt sunthin'. Ain't the aix het, 
think?" The driver pulled up, and, sure enough. 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 6/ 

the off fore-wheel was found to be smoking. In three 
minutes he had snatched a rail from the fence, made 
a lever, raised the coach, and taken off the wheel, 
bathing the hot axle and box with water from the 
river. It was a pretty spot, and I was not sorry to 
lie under a beech-tree (Tityrus-like, meditating over 
my pipe) and watch the operations of the fire-annihi- 
lator. I could not help contrasting the ready help- 
fulness of our driver, all of whose wits were about 
him, current, and redeemable in the specie of action 
on emergency, with an incident of travel in Italy, 
where, under a somewhat similar stress of circum- 
stances, our vetturino had nothing for it but to dash 
his hat on the ground and call on Sant' Antonio, the 
Italian Hercules. 

There being four passengers for the Lake, a vehicle 
called a mud-wagon was detailed at Newport for our 
accommodation. In this we jolted and rattled along 
at a liveHer pace than in the coach. As we got 
farther north, the country (especially the hills) gave 
evidence of longer cultivation. About the thriving 
town of Dexter we saw fine farms and crops. The 
houses, too, became prettier; hop-vines were trained 
about the doors, and hung their clustering thyrsi 
over the open windows. A kind of wild rose (called 
by the country folk the primrose) and asters were 
planted about the door-yards, and orchards, com- 
monly of natural fruit, added to the pleasant home- 
look. But everywhere we could see that the war 
between the white man and the forest was still fierce, 
and that it would be a long while yet before the axe 



6S FIRESIDE T RAVE IS. 

was buried. The haying being over, fires blazed or 
smouldered against the stumps in the fields, and the 
blue smoke widened slowly upward through the quiet 
August atmosphere. It seemed to me that I could 
hear a sigh now and then from the immemorial pines, 
as they stood watching these camp-fires of the inex- 
orable invader. Evening set in, and, as we crunched 
and crawled up the long gravelly hills, I sometimes 
began to fancy that Nature had forgotten to make the 
corresponding descent on the other side. But ere 
long we were rushing down at full speed; and, in- 
spired by the dactylic beat of the horses' hoofs, I 
essayed to repeat the opening lines of Evangeline. 
At the moment I was beginning, we plunged into a 
hollow, where the soft clay had been overcome by a 
road of unhewn logs. I got through one fine to this 
corduroy accompaniment, somewhat as a country 
choir stretches a short metre on the Protestant rock 
of a long-drawn tune. The result was like this: — 

" Thihis ihis thehe fohorest prihihimeheval ; thehe murhur- 
muring pihines hahand thehe hehemlohocks! " 

At a quarter past eleven, p.m., we reached Greenville, 
(a little village which looks as if it had dripped down 
from the hills, and settled in the hollow at the foot of 
the lake,) having accomplished seventy-two miles in 
eighteen hours. The tavern was totally extinguished. 
The driver rapped upon the bar-room window, and 
after a while we saw heat-lightnings of unsuccessful 
matches followed by a low grumble of vocal thunder, 
which I am afraid took the form of imprecation. 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 69 

Presently there was a great success, and the steady 
blur of Hghted tallow succeeded the fugitive brilliance 
of the pine. A hostler fumbled the door open, and 
stood staring at but not seeing us, with the sleep 
sticking out all over him. We at last contrived to 
launch him, more like an insensible missile than an 
intelligent or intelhgible being, at the slumbering 
landlord, who came out wide-awake, and welcomed 
us as so many half-dollars, — twenty-five cents each 
for bed, ditto breakfast. O Shenstone, Shenstone ! 
The only roost was in the garret, which had been made 
into a single room, and contained eleven double-beds, 
ranged along the walls. It was like sleeping in a 
hospital. However, nice customs curtsy to eighteen- 
hour rides, and we slept. 

Saturday, i;^th. — This morning I performed my 
toilet in the bar-room, where there was an abundant 
supply of water, and a halo of interested spectators. 
After a sufficient breakfast, we embarked on the little 
steamer Moosehead, and were soon throbbing up 
the lake. The boat, it appeared, had been chartered 
by a party, this not being one of her regular trips. 
Accordingly we were mulcted in twice the usual fee, 
the philosophy of which I could not understand. 
However, it always comes easier to us to comprehend 
why we receive than why we pay. I dare say it was 
quite clear to the captain. There were three or four 
clearings on the western shore; but after passing 
these, the lake became wholly primeval, and looked 
to us as it did to the first adventurous Frenchman 
who paddled across it. Sometimes a cleared point 



70 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

would be pink with the blossoming willow-herb, "a 
cheap and excellent substitute" for heather, and, 
like all such, not quite so good as the real thing. On 
all sides rose deep-blue mountains, of remarkably 
graceful outHne, and more fortunate than common 
in their names. There were the Big and Little Squaw, 
the Spencer and Lily-bay Mountains. It was de- 
bated whether we saw Katahdin or not, (perhaps 
more useful as an intellectual exercise than the assured 
vision would have been,) and presently Mount Kineo 
rose abruptly before us, in shape not unlike the island 
of Capri. Mountains are called great natural fea- 
tures, and why they should not retain their names long 
enough for them also to become naturalized, it is hard 
to say. Why should every new surveyor rechristen 
them with the gubernatorial patronymics of the cur- 
rent year? They are geological noses, and, as they 
are aquiline or pug, indicate terrestrial idiosyncrasies. 
A cosmical physiognomist, after a glance at them, 
will draw no vague inference as to the character of the 
country. The word nose is no better than any other 
word; but since the organ has got that name, it is 
convenient to keep it. Suppose we had to label our 
facial prominences every season with the name of our 
provincial governor, how should we like it? If the 
old names have no other meaning, they have that of 
age ; and, after all, meaning is a plant of slow growth, 
as every reader of Shakespeare knows. It is well 
enough to call mountains after their discoverers, for 
Nature has a knack of throwing doublets, and some- 
how contrives it that discoverers have good names. 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. yi 

Pike's Peak is a curious hit in this way. But these 
surveyors' names have no natural stick in them. They 
remind one of the epithets of poetasters, which peel 
off like a badly gummed postage-stamp. The early 
settlers did better, and there is something pleasant in 
the sound of Graylock, Saddleback, and Great Hay- 
stack. 

" I love those names 
Wherewith the e.xiled farmer tames 
Nature down to companionship 

With his old world's more homely mood, 
And strives the shaggy wild to clip 

With arms of familiar habitude." 

It is possible that Mount Marcy and Mount Hitch- 
cock may sound as well hereafter as Hellespont and 
Peloponnesus, when the heroes, their namesakes, 
have become mythic with antiquity. But that is to 
look forward a great way. I am no fanatic for Indian 
nomenclature, — the name of my native district 
having been Pigsgusset, — but let us at least agree on 
names for ten years. 

There were a couple of loggers on board, in red 
flannel shirts, and with rifles. They were the first I 
had seen, and I was interested in their appearance. 
They were tall, well-knit men, straight as Robin Hood, 
and with a quiet, self-contained look that pleased me. 
I fell into talk with one of them. 

"Is there a good market for the farmers here in the 
woods?" I asked. 

"None better. They can sell what they raise at 
their doors, and for the best of prices. The lum- 
berers want it all, and more." 



72 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

"It must be a lonely life. But then we all have to 
pay more or less life for a living." 

"Well, it is lonesome. Shouldn't like it. After 
all, the best crop a man can raise is a good crop of 
society. We don't live none too long, anyhow; and 
without society a fellow could n't tell more 'n half the 
time whether he was alive or not." 

This speech gave me a glimpse into the life of the 
lumberers' camp. It was plain that there a man 
would soon find out how much alive he was, — there 
he could learn to estimate his quality, weighed in the 
nicest self-adjusting balance. The best arm at the 
axe or the paddle, the surest eye for a road or for 
the weak point of a ]am^ the steadiest foot upon the 
squirming log, the most persuasive voice to the tug- 
ging oxen, — all these things are rapidly settled, and 
so an aristocracy is evolved from this democracy of the 
woods, for good old mother Nature speaks Saxon still, 
and with her either Canning or Kenning means King. 

A string of five loons was flying back and forth in 
long, irregular zigzags, uttering at intervals their wild, 
tremulous cry, which always seems far away, like the 
last faint pulse of echo dying among the hills, and 
which is one of those few sounds that, instead of dis- 
turbing the solitude, only deepen and confirm it. On 
our inland ponds they are usually seen in pairs, and I 
asked if it were common to meet five together. My 
question was answered by a queer-looking old man, 
chiefly remarkable for a pair of enormous cowhide 
boots, over which large blue trousers of frock in g 
strove in vain to crowd themselves. 



A MOOSE HEAD JOURNAL. 73 

"Wahl, 't ain't ushil," said he, ''and it 's called a 
sign o' rain comin', that is." 

" Do you think it will rain ? " .^^^ j^w^u-t— 

With the caution of a veteran auspex, he evaded a 
direct reply. "Wahl, they du say it 's a sign o' rain 
comin','' said he. 

I discovered afterward that my interlocutor was 
Uncle Zeb. Formerly, every New England town had 
its representative uncle. He was not a pawnbroker, 
but some elderly man who, for want of more defined 
family ties, had gradually assumed this avuncular 
relation to the community, inhabiting the border- 
land between respectability and the almshouse, with 
no regular calling, but working at haying, wood- 
sawing, whitewashing, associated with the demise of 
pigs and the ailments of cattle, and possessing as much 
patriotism as might be implied in a devoted attach- 
ment to "New England" — with a good deal of sugar 
and very httle water in it. Uncle Zeb was a good 
specimen of this palaeozoic class, extinct among us 
for the most part, or surviving, like the Dodo, in the 
Botany Bays of society. He was ready to contribute 
(somewhat muddily) to all general conversation; but 
his chief topics were his boots and the 'Roostick war. 
Upon the lowlands and levels of ordinary palaver he 
would make rapid and unlooked-for incursions; but 
provision failing, he would retreat to these two fast- 
nesses, whence it was impossible to dislodge him, and 
to which he knew innumerable passes and short cuts 
quite beyond the conjecture of common woodcraft. 
His mind opened naturally to these two subjects, like 



74 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

a book to some favorite passage. As the ear accus- 
toms itself to any sound recurring regularly, such as 
the ticking of a clock, and, without a conscious effort 
of attention, takes no impression from it whatever, 
so does the mind find a natural safeguard against this 
pendulum species of discourse, and performs its 
duties in the parliament by an unconscious reflex 
action, like the beating of the heart or the movement 
of the lungs. If talk seemed to be flagging, our 
Uncle would put the heel of one boot upon the toe of 
the other, to bring it within point-blank range, and 
say, "Wahl, I stump the Devil himself to make that 
'ere boot hurt my foot," leaving us no doubt whether 
it were the virtue of the foot or its case which set at 
naught the wiles of the adversary; or, looking up 
suddenly, he would exclaim, "Wahl, we eat some beans 
to the 'Roostick war, I tell yon!'" When his poor old 
clay was wet with gin, his thoughts and words ac- 
quired a rank flavor from it, as from too strong a 
fertilizer. At such times, too, his fancy commonly 
reverted to a prehistoric period of his life, when he 
singly had settled all the surrounding country, sub- 
dued the Injuns and other wild animals, and named 
all the towns. 

We talked of the winter-camps and the life there. 
"The best thing is," said our Uncle, ''to hear a long 
squeal thru the snow. Git a good, cole, frosty 
mornin', in Febuary say, an' take an' hitch the 
critters on to a log that '11 scale seven thousan', an' 
it '11 squeal as pooty as an'thin' you ever hearn, I tell 
youP 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 75 

A pause. 

"Lessee, — seen Cal Hutchins lately?" 

''No." 

''Seems to me 's though I hed n't seen Cal sence the 
'Roostick war. Wahl," etc., etc. 

Another pause. 

"To look at them boots you 'd think they was too 
large; but kind o' git your foot into 'em, and they 're 
as easy 's a glove." (I observed that he never seemed 
really to get his foot in, — there was always a quali- 
fying kind o\) "Wahl, my foot can play in 'em like 
a young hedgehog." 

By this time we had arrived at Kineo, — a flourish- 
ing village of one house, the tavern kept by 'Squire 
Barrows. The 'Squire is a large, hearty man, with a 
voice as clear and strong as a northwest wind and a 
great laugh suitable to it. His table is neat and well 
supplied, and he waits upon it himself in the good old 
landlordly fashion. One may be much better off 
here, to my thinking, than in one of those gigantic 
Columbaria which are foisted upon us patient Ameri- 
cans for hotels, and where one is packed away in a 
pigeon-hole so near the heavens that, if the comet 
should flirt its tail (no unlikely thing in the month of 
flies), one would be in danger of being brushed away. 
Here one does not pay his diurnal three dollars for an 
undivided five-hundredth part of the pleasure of 
looking at gilt gingerbread. Here one's relations are 
with the monarch himself, and one is not obliged to 
wait the slow leisure of those "attentive clerks" whose 
praises are sung by thankful deadheads, and to whom 



^6 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

the slave who pays may feel as much gratitude as 
might thrill the heart of a brown-paper parcel toward 
the express-man who labels it and chucks it under his 
counter. 

Sunday, 14th. — The loons were right. About 
midnight it began to rain in earnest, and did not hold 
up till about ten o'clock this morning. "This is a 
Maine dew," said a shaggy woodman cheerily, as he 
shook the water out of his wide-awake, "if it don't 
look out sharp, it '11 begin to rain afore it thinks on 't." 
The day was mostly spent within doors ; but I found 
good and intelligent society. We should have to be 
shipwrecked on Juan Fernandez not to find men who 
knew more than we.. In these travelling encounters 
one is thrown upon his own resources, and is worth 
just what he carries about him. The social currency 
of home, the smooth-worn coin which passes freely 
among friends and neighbors, is of no account. We 
are thrown back upon the old system of barter; and, 
even with savages, we bring away only as much of the 
wild wealth of the woods as we carry beads of thought 
and experience, strung one by one in painful years, 
to pay for them with. A useful old jackknife will buy 
more than the daintiest Louis Quinze paper-folder 
fresh from Paris. Perhaps the kind of intelligence 
one gets in these out-of-the-way places is the best, — 
where one takes a fresh man after breakfast instead 
of the damp morning paper, and where the magnetic 
telegraph of human sympathy flashes swift news from 
brain to brain. 

Meanwhile, at a pinch, to-morrow's weather can be 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. J J 

discussed. The augury from the flight of birds is 
favorable, — the loons no longer prophesying rain. 
The wind also is hauling round to the right quarter, 
according to some, to the wrong, if we are to believe 
others. Each man has his private barometer of hope, 
the mercury in which is more or less sensitive, and 
the opinion vibrant with its rise or fall. Mine has an 
index which can be moved mechanically. I fixed it 
at set fair, and resigned myself. I read an old volume 
of the Patent-Office Report on Agriculture, and 
stored away a beautiful pile of facts and observations 
for future use, which the current of occupation, a I its 
first freshet, would sweep quietly off to blank oblivion. 
Practical application is the only mordant which will 
set things in the memory. Study, without it, is gym- 
nastics, and not work, which alone will get intellectual 
bread. One learns more metaphysics from a single 
temptation than from all the philosophers. It is curious, 
though, how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and 
what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no 
bore we dread being left alone with so much as our 
own minds. I have seen a sensible man study a stale 
newspaper in a country tavern, and husband it as he 
would an old shoe on a raft after shipwreck. Why 
not try a bit of hibernation? There are few brains 
that would not be better for living on their own fat a 
little while. With these reflections, I, notwithstand- 
ing, spent the afternoon over my Report. If our own 
experience is of so little use to us, what a dolt is he who 
recommends to man or nation the experience of others ! 
Like the mantle in the old ballad, it is always too 



2S FIRESIDE TRAVELS, 

short or too long, and exposes or trips us up. ''Keep 
out of that candle," says old Father Miller, "or you '11 
get a singeing." "Pooh, pooh, father, I've been 
dipped in the new asbestos preparation," and jrozz! 
it is all over vi^ith young Hopeful. How many warn- 
ings have been drawn from Pretorian bands, and 
Janizaries, and Mamelukes, to make Napoleon III. 
impossible in 185 1 ! I found myself thinking the 
same thoughts over again, when we walked later on 
the beach and picked up pebbles. The old time- 
ocean throws upon its shores just such rounded and 
polished results of the eternal turmoil, but we only 
see the beauty of those we have got the headache in 
stooping for ourselves, and wonder at the dull brown 
bits of common stone with which our comrades have 
stuffed their pockets. Afterwards this little fable 
came of it. 

DOCTOR LOBSTER. 

A PERCH, who had the toothache, once 
Thus moaned, like any human dunce : 
" Why must great souls exhaust so soon 
Life's thin and unsubstantial boon ? 
Existence on such scuipin terms, — 
Their vulgar loves and hard-won worms, — 
What is it all but dross to me, 
Whose nature craves a larger sea; 
Whose inches, six from head to tail, 
Enclose the spirit of a whale ; 
Who, if great baits were still to win. 
By watchful eye and fearless fin 
Might with the Zodiac's awful twain 
Room for a third immortal gain? 
Better the crowd's unthinking plan, — 
The hook, the jerk, the frying-pan ! 
O Deatli, thou ever roaming shark, 
Ingulf me in eternal dark ! " 



A MOOSE HEAD JOURNAL. 79 

The speech was cut in two by flight : 

A real shark had come in sight; 

No metaphoric monster, one 

It soothes despair to call upon, 

But stealthy, sidelong, grim, I wis, 

A bit of downright Nemesis ; 

While it recovered from the shock, 

Our fish took shelter 'neath a rock : 

This was an ancient lobster's house, 

A lobster of prodigious nous. 

So old that barnacles had spread 

Their white encampments o'er its head, — 

And of experience so stupend. 

His claws were blunted at the end, 

Turning life's iron pages o'er. 

That shut and can be oped no more. 

Stretching a hospitable claw, 

" At once,'' said he, " the point I saw ; 

My dear young friend, your case I rue. 

Your great-great-grandfather I knew; 

He was a tried and tender friend 

I know, — I ate him in the end : 

In this vile sea a pilgrim long. 

Still my sight's good, my memory strong; 

The only sign that age is near 

Is a slight deafness in this ear; 

I understand your case as well 

As this my old familiar shell ; 

This sorrow 's a new-fangled notion, 

Come in since first I knew the ocean; 

We had no radicals, nor crimes. 

Nor lobster-pots, in good old times; 

Your traps and nets and hooks we owe 

To Mrssieurs Louis Blanc and Co. ; 

I say to all my sons and daughters, 

Shun Red Republican hot waters ; 

No lobster ever cast his lot 

Among the reds, but went to pot: 

Your trouble 's in the jaw, you said ? 

Come, let me just nip off your head, 

And, when a new one comes, the pain 

Will never trouble you again : 

Nay, nay, fear naught : 't is nature's law. 

Four times I 've lost this starboard claw; 

And still, erelong, another grew. 

Good as the old, — and better too ! " 



80 FIRESIDE TRAVEIS. 



The perch consented, and next day 
An osprey, marketing that way, 
Picked up a fish without a head. 
Floating with belly up, stone dead. 

MORAL. 

Sharp are the teeth of ancient saws, 
And sauce for goose is gander's sauce; 
But perch's heads are n't lobster's claws. 



Monday, 15///. — The morning was fine, and we 
were called at four o'clock. At the moment my door 
was knocked at, I was mounting a giraffe with that 
charming nil admirari which characterizes dreams, to 
visit Prester John. Rat-tat-tat-tat ! upon my door 
and upon the horn gate of dreams also. I remarked 
to my skowhegan (the Tatar for giraffe -driver) that 
I was quite sure the animal had the raps, a com- 
mon disease among them, for I heard a queer knock- 
ing noise inside him. It is the sound of his joints, O 
Tambourgi ! (an Oriental term of reverence,) and 
proves him to be of the race of El Keirat. Rat-tat - 
tat-too! and I lost my dinner at the Prester's, em- 
barking for a voyage to the Northwest Carry instead. 
Never use the word canoe, my dear Storg, if you wish 
to retain your self-respect. Birch is the term among 
us backwoodsmen. I never knew it till yesterday; 
but, like a true philosopher, I made it appear as if I 
had been intimate with it from childhood. The 
rapidity with which the human mind levels itself to 
the standard around it gives us the most pertinent 
warning as to the company we keep. It is as hard 
for most characters to stay at their own average point 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 8 I 

in all companies, as for a thermometer to say 65° for 
twenty-four hours together. I like this in our friend 
Johannes Taurus, that he carries everywhere and 
maintains his insular temperature, and will have 
everything accommodate itself to that. Shall I con- 
fess that this morning I would rather have broken the 
moral law, than have endangered the equipoise of the 
birch by my awkwardness? that I should have been 
prouder of a compliment to my paddling, than to 
have had both my guides suppose me the author of 
Hamlet? Well, Cardinal Richelieu used to jump 
over chairs. 

We were to paddle about twenty miles; but we 
made it rather more by crossing and recrossing the 
lake. Twice we landed, — once at a camp, where we 
found the cook alone, baking bread and gingerbread. 
Monsieur Soyer would have been startled a little 
by this shaggy professor, — this Pre-Raphaelite of 
cookery. He represented the salceratus period of the 
art, and his bread was of a brilliant yellow, like those 
cakes tinged with saflfron, which hold out so long 
against time and the flies in little water-side shops of 
seaport towns, — dingy extremities of trade fit to 
moulder on Lethe wharf. His water was better, 
squeezed out of ice-cold granite in the neighboring 
mountains, and sent through subterranean ducts to 
sparkle up by the door of the camp. 

"There 's nothin' so sweet an' hulsome as your real 
spring water," said Uncle Zeb, "git it pure. But it 's 
dreffle hard to git it that ain't got sunthin' the matter 
of it. Snow-water '11 burn a man's inside out, — I 



82 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

larned that to the 'Roostick war, — and the snow 
lays terrible long on some o' thes'ere hills. Me an' 
Eb Stiles was up old Ktahdn once jest about this time 
o' year, an' we come acrost a kind o' holler like, 
as full o' snow as your stockin 's full o' your 
foot. / see it fust, an' took an' rammed a settin'- 
pole; wahl, it was all o' twenty foot into 't, an' 
could n't fin' no bottom. I dunno as there 's snow- 
water enough in this to do no hurt. I don't somehow 
seem to think that real spring water 's so plenty as it 
used to be." And Uncle Zeb, with perhaps a little 
over-refinement of scrupulosity, applied his Hps to the 
Ethiop ones of a bottle of raw gin, with a kiss that 
drew out its very soul, — a hasia that Secundus might 
have sung. He must have been a wonderful judge 
of water, for he analyzed this, and detected its latent 
snow simply by his eye, and without the clumsy 
process of tasting. I could not help thinking that 
he had made the desert his dwelling-place chiefly 
in order to enjoy the ministrations of this one fair 
spirit unmolested. 

We pushed on. Little islands loomed trembling 
between sky and water, Hke hanging gardens. Grad- 
ually the filmy trees defined themselves, the aerial 
enchantment lost its potency, and we came up with 
common prose islands that had so late been magical 
and poetic. The old story of the attained and un- 
attained. About noon we reached the head of the 
lake, and took possession of a deserted wongen, in 
which to cook and eat our dinner. No Jew, I am 
sure, can have a more thorough dislike of salt pork 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 83 

than I have in a normal state, yet I had already eaten 
it raw with hard bread for lunch, and relished it 
keenly. We soon had our tea-kettle over the fire, 
and before long the cover was chattering with the es- 
caping steam, which had thus vainly begged of all 
men to be saddled and bridled, till James Watt one 
day happened to overhear it. One of our guides shot 
three Canada grouse, and these were turned slowly 
between the fire and a bit of salt pork, which dropped 
fatness upon them as it fried. Although my fingers 
were certainly not made before knives and forks, yet 
they served as a convenient substitute for those more 
ancient inventions. We sat round, Turk-fashion, and 
ate thankfully, while a party of aborigines of the Mos- 
quito tribe, who had camped in the wongen before 
we arrived, dined upon us. I do not know what the 
British Protectorate of the Mosquitoes amounts to; 
but, as I squatted there at the mercy of these blood- 
thirsty savages, I no longer wondered that the classic 
Everett had been stung into a willingness for war on 
the question. 

"This 'ere 'd be about a complete place for a camp, 
ef there was on'y a spring o' sweet water handy. 
Frizzled pork goes wal, don't it? Yes, an' sets wal, 
too," said Uncle Zeb, and he again tilted his bottle, 
which rose nearer and nearer to an angle of forty -five 
at every gurgle. He then broached a curious dietetic 
theory: "The reason we take salt p)ork along is cos 
it packs handy : you git the greatest amount o' board 
in the smallest compass, — let alone that it 's more 
nourishin' than an' thin' else. It kind o' don't disgest 



84 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

so quick, but stays by ye, anourishin' ye all the 
while. 

"A feller can live wal on frizzled pork an' good 
spring-water, git it good. To the 'Roostick war we 
did n't ask for nothin' better,' — on'y beans." {Tilt, 
tilt, gurgle, gurgle.) Then, with an apparent feeling 
of inconsistency, "But then, come to git used to a par- 
ticular kind o' spring-water, an' it makes a feller hard 
to suit. Most all sorts o' water taste kind o' insipid 
away from home. Now, I 've gut a spring to my 
place that 's as sweet — wahl, it 's as sweet as maple 
sap. A feller acts about water jest as he does about 
a pair o' boots. It 's all on it in gittin' wonted. Now, 
them boots," etc., etc. {Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, 
smack !) 

All this while he was packing away the remains of 
the pork and hard bread in two large firkins. This 
accomplished, we reembarked, our uncle on his way 
to the birch essaying a kind of song in four or five 
parts, of which the words were hilarious and the tune 
profoundly melancholy, and which was finished, and 
the rest of his voice apparently jerked out of him in 
one sharp falsetto note, by his tripping over the root 
of a tree. We paddled a short distance up a brook 
which came into the lake smoothly through a httle 
meadow not far off. We soon reached the Northwest 
Carry, and our guide, pointing through the woods, 
said : ''That 's the Cannydy road. You can travel that 
clearn to Kebeck, a hunderd an' twenty mile," — 
a privilege of which I respectfully declined to avail 
myself. The offer, however, remains open to the 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 85 

public. The Carry is called two miles; but this is 
the estimate of somebody who had nothing to lug. I 
had a headache and all my baggage, which, with a 
traveller's instinct, I had brought with me. (P. S. — 
I did not even take the keys out of my pocket, and 
both my bags were wet through before I came back. 
My estimate of the distance is eighteen thousand six 
hundred and seventy-four miles and three quarters, — 
the fraction being the part left to be travelled after 
one of my companions most kindly insisted on re- 
lieving me of my heaviest bag. I know very well that 
the ancient Roman soldiers used to carry sixty pounds' 
weight, and all that; but I am not, and never shall be, 
an ancient Roman soldier, — no, not even in the 
miraculous Thundering Legion. Uncle Zeb slung 
the two provender firkins across his shoulder, and 
trudged along, grumbling that ''he never see sech a 
contrairy pair as them." He had begun upon a sec- 
ond bottle of his "particular kind o' spring-water," 
and, at every rest, the gurgle of this peripatetic foun- 
tain might be heard, followed by a smack, a frag- 
ment of mosaic song, or a confused clatter with the 
cowhide boots, being an arbitrary symbol, intended 
to represent the festive dance. Christian's pack gave 
him not half so much trouble as the firkins gave Uncle 
Zeb. It grew harder and harder to sling them, and 
with every fresh gulp of the Batavian elixir, they got 
heavier. Or rather, the truth was, that his hat grew 
heavier, in which he was carrying on an extensive 
manufacture of bricks without straw. At last affairs 
reached a crisis, and a particularly favorable pitch 



86 FIRESIDE TRAVELS, 

offering, with a puddle at the foot of it, even the boots 
afforded no sufficient ballast, and away went our uncle, 
the satellite firkins accompanying faithfully his head- 
long flight. Did ever exiled monarch or disgr. ced 
minister find the cause of his fall in himself? Is there 
not always a strawberry at the bottom of our cup of 
life, on which we can lay all the blame of our devia- 
tions from the straight path? Till now Uncle Zeb 
had contrived to give a gloss of volition to smaller 
stumblings and gyrations, by exaggerating them into 
an appearance of playful burlesque. But the present 
case was beyond any such subterfuges. He held a 
bed of justice where he sat, and then arose slowly, with 
a stern determination of vengeance stiffening every 
muscle of his face. But what would he select as the 
culprit? "It's that cussed firkin," he mumbled to 
himself. "I never knowed a firkin cair on so, — no, 
not in the 'Roostehicick war. There, go long, will 
ye? and don't come back till you 've larned how to 
walk with a genelman!" And, seizing the unhappy 
scapegoat by the bail, he hurled it into the forest. It 
is a curious circumstance, that it was not the firkin 
containing the bottle which was thus condemned to 
exile. 

The end of the Carry was reached at last, and, as 
we drew near it, we heard a sound of shouting and 
laughter. It came from a party of men making hay 
of the wild grass in Seboomok meadows, which lie 
around Seboomok pond, into which the Carry empties 
itself. Their camp was near, and our two hunters set 
out for it, leaving us seated in the birch on the plashy 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 8/ 

border of the pond. The repose was perfect. An- 
other heaven hallowed and deepened the polished 
lake, and through that nether world the fish-hawk's 
double floated with balanced wings, or, wheeling 
suddenly, flashed his whitened breast against the sun. 
As the clattering kingfisher flew unsteadily across, 
and seemed to push his heavy head along with ever- 
renewing effort, a visionary mate flitted from down- 
ward tree to tree below. Some tall alders shaded us 
from the sun, in whose yellow afternoon light the 
drowsy forest was steeped, giving out that wholesome 
resinous perfume, almost the only warm odor which 
it is refreshing to breathe. The tame hay-cocks in 
the midst of the wildness gave one a pleasant remi- 
niscence of home, like hearing one's native tongue in a 
strange country. 

Presently our hunters came back, bringing with 
them a tall, thin, active-looking man, with black eyes, 
that glanced unconsciously on all sides, like one of 
those spots of sunlight which a child dances up and 
down the street with a bit of looking-glass. This was 
M., the captain of the hay-makers, a famous river- 
driver, and who was to have fifty men under him next 
winter. I could now understand that sleepless vigi- 
lance of eye. He had consented to take two of our 
party in his birch to search for moose. A quick, 
nervous, decided man, he got them into the birch, and 
was ofi^ instantly, without a superfluous word. He 
evidently looked upon them as he would upon a 
couple of logs which he was to deliver at a certain 
place. Indeed, I doubt if Hfe and the world pre- 



88 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

sented themselves to Napier himself in a more loga- 
rithmic way. His only thought was to do the imme- 
diate duty well, and to pilot his particular raft down 
the crooked stream of life to the ocean beyond. The 
birch seemed to feel him as an inspiring soul, and 
slid away straight and swift for the outlet of the 
pond. As he disappeared under the over-arching 
alders of the brook, our two hunters could not repress 
a grave and measured applause. There is never any 
extravagance among these woodmen; their eye, ac- 
customed to reckoning the number of feet which a 
tree will scale, is rapid and close in its guess of the 
amount of stuff in a man. It was laudari a laudato, 
however, for they themselves were accounted good 
men in a birch. I was amused, in talking with them 
about him, to meet with an instance of that tenden:y 
of the human mind to assign some utterly improbable 
reason for gifts which seem unaccountable. After 
due praise, one of them said, "I guess he 's got some 
Injun in him," although I knew very well that the 
speaker had a thorough contempt for the red-man, 
mentally and physically. Here was mythology in a 
small way, — the same that under more favorable 
auspices hatched Helen out of an egg and gave Merlin 
an Incubus for a father. I was pleased with all I saw 
of M. He was in his narrow sphere a true ai/a^ avhpoiv, 
and the ragged edges of his old hat seemed to become 
coronated as I looked at him. He impressed me 
as a man really educated, — that is, with his aptitudes 
drawn out and ready for use. He was A. M. and 
LL. D. in Woods College, — Axe Master and Doc- 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 89 

tor of Logs. Are not our educations commonly like 
a pile of books laid over a plant in a pot? The com- 
pressed nature struggles through at every crevice, but 
can never get the cramp and stunt out of it. We 
spend all our youth in building a vessel for our voy- 
age of life, and set forth with streamers flying; but 
the moment we come nigh the great loadstone moun- 
tain of our proper destiny, out leap all our carefully 
driven bolts and nails, and we get many a mouthful 
of good salt brine, and many a buffet of the rough 
water of experience, before we secure the bare right 
to live. 

We now entered the outlet, a long-drawn aisle of 
alder, on each side of which spired tall firs, spruces, 
and white cedars. The motion of the birch reminded 
me of the gondola, and they represent among the 
water-craft the jelidce, the cat* tribe, stealthy, silent, 
treacherous, and preying by night. I closed my eyes 
and strove to fancy myself in the dumb city, whose 
only horses are the bronze ones of St. Mark. But 
Nature would allow no rival, and bent down an alder 
bough to brush my cheek and recall me. Only the 
robin sings in the emerald chambers of these tall sylvan 
palaces, and the squirrel leaps from hanging balcony 
to balcony. 

The rain which the loons foreboded had raised the 
west branch of the Penobscot so much, that a strong 
current was setting back into the pond ; and, when at 
last we brushed through into the river, it was full to 
the brim, — too full for moose, the hunters said. 
Rivers with low banks have always the compensation 



90 FIRESIDE TRAVELS, 

of giving a sense of entire fulness. The sun sank 
behind its horizon of pines, whose pointed summits 
notched the rosy west in an endless black sierra. At 
the same moment the golden moon swung slowly up 
in the east, like the other scale of that Homeric bal- 
ance in which Zeus weighed the deeds of men. Sun- 
set and moonrise at once ! Adam had no more in 
Eden — except the head of Eve upon his shoulder. 
The stream was so smooth, that the floating logs we 
met seemed to hang in a glowing atmosphere, the 
sTiadow-half being as real as the solid. And gradu- 
ally the mind was etherized to a like dreamy placidity, 
till fact and fancy, the substance and the image, float- 
ing on the current of reverie, became but as the upper 
and under halves of one unreal reaHty. 

In the west still lingered a pale-green light. I do 
not know whether it be from greater familiarity, but 
it always seems to me that the pinnacles of pine-trees 
make an edge to the landscape which tells better 
against the twilight, or the fainter dawn before the 
rising moon, than the rounded and cloud-cumulus 
outline of hard-wood trees. 

After paddling a couple of miles, we found the 
arbored mouth of the little Malahoodus River, famous 
for moose. We had been on the look-out for it, and 
I was amused to hear one of the hunters say to the 
other, to assure himself of his familiarity with the spot, 
"You drove the West Branch last spring, didn't 
you?" as one of us might ask about a horse. We did 
not explore the Malahoodus far, but left the other 
birch to thread its cedared solitudes, while we turned 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 91 

back to try our fortunes in the larger stream. We 
paddled on about four miles farther, lingering now 
and then opposite the black mouth of a moose-path. 
The incidents of our voyage were few, but quite as 
exciting and profitable as the items of the newspapers. 
A stray log compensated very well for the ordinary 
run of accidents, and the floating carkiss of a moose 
which we met could pass muster instead of a singular 
discovery of human remains by workmen in digging a 
cellar. Once or twice we saw what seemed ghosts 
of trees; but they turned out to be dead cedars, in 
winding-sheets of long gray moss, made spectral by 
the moonlight. Just as we were turning to drift back 
down-stream, we heard a loud gnawing sound close 
by us on the bank. One of our guides thought it a 
hedgehog, the other a bear. I inclined to the bear, as 
making the adventure more imposing. A rifle was 
fired at the sound, which began again with the most 
provoking indifference, ere the echo, flaring madly at 
first from shore to shore, died far away in a hoarse 
sigh. 

Half past Eleven, p.m. — No sign of a moose yet. 
The birch, it seems, was strained at the Carry, or the 
pitch was softened as she lay on the shore during dinner, 
and she leaks a little. If there be any virtue in the 
sitzbad, I shall discover it. If I cannot extract green 
cucumbers from the moon's rays, I get something 
quite as cool. One of the guides shivers so as to 
shake the birch. 

Quarter to Twelve. — Later from the Freshet/ — 
The water in the birch is about three inches deep, but 



92 FIRESIDE TRAVEIS. 

the dampness reaches already nearly to the waist. I am 
obliged to remove the matches from the ground floor 
of my trousers into the upper story of a breast-pocket. 
Meanwhile, we are to sit immovable, — for fear of 
frightening the moose, — which induces cramps. 

Hal] past Twelve. — A crashing is heard on the 
left bank. This is a moose in good earnest. We are 
besought to hold our breaths, if possible. My fingers 
so numb, I could not, if I tried. Crash! crash! 
again, and then a plunge, followed by dead stillness. 
''Swimmin' crik," whispers guide, suppressing all 
unnecessary parts of speech, — "don't stir." I, for 
one, am not likely to. A cold fog which has been 
gathering for the last hour has finished me. I fancy 
myself one of those naked pigs that seem rushing out 
of market-doors in winter, frozen in a ghastly attitude 
of gallop. If I were to be shot myself, I should feel 
no interest in it. As it is, I am only a spectator, having 
declined a gun! Splash ! again ; this time the moose 
is in sight, and click ! click ! one rifle misses fire after 
the other. The fog has quietly spiked our batteries. 
The moose goes crashing up the bank, and presently 
we can hear it chewing its cud close by. So we lie in 
wait, freezing. 

At one o'clock, I propose to land at a deserted 
wongen I had noticed on the way up, where I will 
make a fire, and leave them to refrigerate as much 
longer as they please. Axe in hand, I go plunging 
through waist-deep weeds dripping with dew, haunted 
by an intense conviction that the gnawing sound we 
had heard was a bear, and a bear at least eighteen 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 93 

hands high. There is something pokerish about a 
deserted dwelling, even in broad daylight; but here 
in the obscure wood, and the moon filtering unwill- 
ingly through the trees! Well, I made the door at 
last, and found the place packed fuller with darkness 
than it ever had been with hay. Gradually I was 
able to make things out a little, and began to hack 
frozenly at a log which I groped out. I was relieved 
presently by one of the guides. He cut at once into 
one of the uprights of the building till he got some dry 
splinters, and we soon had a fire like the burning of a 
whole wood-wharf in our part of the country. My 
companion went back to the birch, and left me to 
keep house. First I knocked a hole in the roof (which 
the fire began to lick in a relishing way) for a chimney, 
and then cleared away a damp growth of "pison- 
elder," to make a sleeping place. When the unsuc- 
cessful hunters returned, I had everything quite 
comfortable, and was steaming at the rate of about 
ten horse-power a minute. Young Telemachus was 
sorry to give up the moose so soon, and, with the 
teeth chattering almost out of his head, he declared 
that he would like to stick it out all night. However, 
he reconciled himself to the fire, and, making our 
beds of some "splits" which we poked from the roof, 
we lay down at half past two. I, who have inherited 
a habit of looking into every closet before I go to bed, 
for fear of fire, had become in two days such a stoic 
of the woods, that I went to sleep tranquilly, certain 
that my bedroom would be in a blaze before morning. 
And so, indeed, it was; and the withes that bound 



94 FIRESIDE TRAVEIS. 

it together being burned off, one of the sides fell in 
without waking me. 

Tuesday^ i6th. — After a sleep of two hours and a 
half, so sound that it was as good as eight, we started 
at half past four for the haymakers' camp again. We 
found them just getting breakfast. We sat down 
upon the deacon-seat before the fire blazing between 
the bedroom and the salle a manger, which were 
simply two roofs of spruce-bark, sloping to the ground 
on one side, the other three being left open. We found 
that we had, at least, been luckier than the other party, 
for M. had brought back his convoy without even see- 
ing a moose. As there was not room at the table for 
all of us to breakfast together, these hospitable wood- 
men forced us to sit down first, although we resisted 
stoutly. Our breakfast consisted of fresh bread, fried 
salt pork, stewed whortleberries, and tea. Our kind 
hosts refused to take money for it, nor would M. 
accept anything for his trouble. This seemed even 
more open-handed when I remembered that they had 
brought all their stores over the Carry upon their 
shoulders, paying an ache extra for every pound. If 
their hospitality lacked anything of hard external 
polish, it had all the deeper grace which springs only 
from sincere manliness. I have rarely sat at a table 
d'hote which might not have taken a lesson from them 
in essential courtesy. I have never seen a finer race 
of men. They have all the virtues of the sailor, with- 
out that unsteady roll in the gait with which the ocean 
proclaims itself quite as much in the moral as in the 
physical habit of a man. They appeared to me to 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 95 

have hewn out a short northwest passage through 
wintry woods to those spice-lands of character which 
we dwellers in cities must reach, if at all, by weary 
voyages in the monotonous track of the trades. 

By the way, as we were embirching last evening for 
our moose-chase, I asked what I was to do with my 
baggage. "Leave it here," said our guide, and he 
laid the bags upon a platform of alders, which he bent 
down to keep them beyond reach of the rising water. 

"Will they be safe here?" 

"As safe as they would be locked up in your house 
at home." 

And so I found them at my return; only the hay- 
makers had carried them to their camp for greater 
security against the chances of the weather. 

We got back to Kineo in time for dinner; and in 
the afternoon, the weather being fine, went up the 
mountain. As we landed at the foot, our guide 
pointed to the remains of a red shirt and a pair of 
blanket trousers. "That," said he, "is the reason 
there 's such a trade in ready-made clo'es. A suit gits 
pooty well wore out by the time a camp breaks up in 
the spring, and the lumberers want to look about right 
when they come back into the settlements, so they buy 
somethin' ready-made, and heave ole bust-up into the 
bush." True enough, thought I, this is the Ready- 
made Age. It is quicker being covered than fitted. 
So we all go to the slop-shop and come out uniformed, 
every mother's son with habits of thinking and doing 
cut on one pattern, with no special reference to his 
pecuHar build. 



96 FIRESIDE TRAVEIS. 

Kineo rises 1750 feet above the sea, and 750 above 
the lake. The climb is very easy, with fine outlooks 
at every turn over lake and forest. Near the top is a 
spring of w^ater, which even Uncle Zeb might have 
allowed to be wholesome. The little tin dipper was 
scratched all over with names, showing that vanity, 
at least, is not put out of breath by the ascent. O 
Ozymandias, King of kings! We are all scrawling 
on something of the kind. "My name is engraved 
on the institutions of my country," thinks the states- 
man. But, alas! institutions are as changeable as 
tin-dippers; men are content to drink the same old 
water, if the shape of the cup only be new, and our 
friend gets two lines in the Biographical Dictionaries. 
After all, these inscriptions, which make us smile up 
here, are about as valuable as the Assyrian ones which 
Hincks and Rawlinson read at cross-purposes. Have 
we not Smiths and Browns enough, that we must 
ransack the ruins of Nimroud for more? Near the 
spring we met a Bloomer ! It was the first chronic 
one I had ever seen. It struck me as a sensible cos- 
tume for the occasion, and it will be the only wear in 
the Greek Kalends, when women believe that sense 
is an equivalent for grace. 

The forest primeval is best seen from the top of a 
mountain. It then impresses one by its extent, like 
an Oriental epic. To be in it is nothing, for then an 
acre is as good as a thousand square miles. You 
cannot see five rods in any direction, and the ferns, 
mosses, and tree-trunks just around you are the best 
of it. As for solitude, night will make a better one 



A MOOSE HEAD JOURNAL. 97 

with ten feet square of pitch dark ; and mere size is 
hardly an element of grandeur, except in works of 
man, — as the Colosseum. It is through one or the 
other pole of vanity that men feel the sublime in moun- 
tains. It is either. How small great I am beside it ! 
or, Big as you are, little I's soul will hold a dozen of 
you. The true idea of a forest is not a selva selvaggia, 
but something humanized a little, as we imagine the 
forest of Arden, with trees standing at royal intervals, 
— a commonwealth, and not a communism. To 
some moods, it is congenial to look over endless 
leagues of unbroken savagery without a hint of man. 

Wednesday. — This morning fished. Telemachus 
caught a laker of thirteen pounds and a half, and I an 
overgrown cusk, which we threw away, but which I 
found afterwards Agassiz would have been glad of, 
for all is fish that comes to his net, from the fossil 
down. The fish, when caught, are straightway 
knocked on the head. A lad who went with us seem- 
ing to show an over-zeal in this operation, we re- 
monstrated. But he gave a good, human reason for 
it, — "He no need to ha' gone and been a fish if he 
did n't Hke it," — an excuse which superior strength 
or cunning has always found sufficient. It v/as some 
comfort, in this case, to think that St. Jerome believed 
in a limitation of God's providence, and that it did 
not extend to inanimate things or creatures devoid of 
reason. 

Thus, my dear Storg, I have finished my Oriental 
adventures, and somewhat, it must be owned, in the 
diffuse Oriental manner. There is very little about 



98 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

Moosehead Lake in it, and not even the Latin name 
f jr moose, which I might have obtained by sufficient 
research. If I had killed one, I would have given you 
his name in that dead language. I did not profess to 
give you an account of the lake; but a journal, and, 
moreover, my journal, with a little nature, a little 
human nature, and a great deal of I in it, which last 
ingredient I take to be the true spirit of this species 
of writing ; all the rest being so much water for tendei 
throats which cannot take it neat. 



LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL 
IN ITALY AND ELSE- 
WHERE, 



AT SEA. 

The sea was meant to be looked at from shore, as 
mountains are from the plain. Lucretius made this 
discovery long ago, and was blunt enough to blurt it 
forth, romance and sentiment — in other words, the 
pretence of feeling what we do not feel — being in- 
ventions of a later day. To be sure, Cicero used to 
twaddle about Greek literature and philosophy, much 
as people do about ancient art nowadays; but I 
rather sympathize with those stout old Romans who 
despised both, and believed that to found an empire 
was as grand an achievement as to build an epic or to 
carve a statue. But though there might have been 
twaddle (as why not, since there was a Senate?) I 
rather think Petrarch was the first choragus of that 
sentimental dance which so long led young folks away 
from the reahties of life like the piper of Hamelin, and 
whose succession ended, let us hope, with Chateau- 
briand. But for them, Byron, whose real strength lay 
in his sincerity, would never have talked about the 
"sea bounding beneath him like a steed that knows 
his rider," and all that sort of thing. Even if it had 
been true, steam has been as fatal to that part of the 
romance of the sea as to hand-loom weaving. But 
what say you to a twelve days' calm such as we dozed 
through in mid-Atlantic and in mid-August? I 
know nothing so tedious at once and exasperating 



102 FIRESIDE TRAVEIS, 

as that regular slap of the wilted sails when the ship 
rises and falls with the slow breathing of the sleeping 
sea, one greasy, brassy swell following another, slow, 
smooth, immitigable as the series of Wordsworth's 
"Ecclesiastical Sonnets." Even at his best, Neptune, 
in a iHe-a-lHe, has a way of repeating himself, an 
obtuseness to the ne quid nimis, that is stupefying. 
It reminds me of organ music and my good friend 
Sebastian Bach. A fugue or two will do very well; 
but a concert made up of nothing else is altogether 
too epic for me. There is nothing so desperately 
monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the 
cruelty of pirates. Fancy an existence in which the 
coming up of a clumsy finback whale, who says Pooh ! 
to you solemnly as you lean over the taffrail is an 
event as exciting as an election on shore ! The damp- 
ness seems to strike into the wits as into the lucifer- 
matches, so that one may scratch a thought half a 
dozen times and get nothing at last but a faint sputter, 
the forlorn hope of fire, which only goes far enough to 
leave a sense of suflPocation behind it. Even smoking 
becomes an employment instead of a solace. Who 
less likely to come to their wit's end than W. M. T. 
and A. H. C. ? Yet I have seen them driven to five 
meals a day for mental occupation. I sometimes sit 
and pity Noah; but even he had this advantage over 
all succeeding navigators, that, wherever he landed, 
he was sure to get no ill news from home. He should 
be canonized as the patron-saint of newspaper cor- 
respondents, being the only man who ever had the 
very last authentic intelligence from everywhere. 



AT SEA. 103 

The finback whale recorded just above has much 
the look of a brown-paper parcel, — the whitish 
stripes that run across him answering for the pack- 
thread. He has a kind of accidental hole in the top 
of his head, through which he pooh-poohs the rest of 
creation, and which looks as if it had been made by 
the chance thrust of a chestnut rail. He was our first 
event. Our second was harpooning a sunfish, which 
basked dozing on the lap of the sea, looking so much 
like the giant turtle of an alderman's dream, that I am 
persuaded he would have made mock-turtle soup 
rather than acknowledge his imposture. But he broke 
away just as they were hauling him over the side, and 
sank placidly through the clear water, leaving behind 
him a crimson trail that wavered a moment and was 
gone. 

The sea, though, has better sights than these. 
When we were up with the Azores, we began to meet 
flying-fish and Portuguese men-of-war beautiful as 
the galley of Cleopatra, tiny craft that dared these 
seas before Columbus. I have seen one of the former 
rise from, the crest of a wave, and, glancing from 
another some two hundred feet beyond, take a fresh 
flight of perhaps as long. How Calderon would have 
similized this pretty creature had he ever seen it! 
How would he have run him up and down the gamut 
of simile ! If a fish, then a fish with wings ; if a bird, 
then a bird with fins ; and so on, keeping up the poor 
shuttlecock of a conceit as is his wont. Indeed, the 
poor thing is the most killing bait for a comparison, 
and I assure you I have three or four in my inkstand ; 



I04 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

— but be calm, thcv shall stay there. Moore, who 
looked on all nature as a kind of Gradus ad Parnas- 
sum, a thesaurus of similitude, and spent his life in a 
game of What is my thought like? with himself, did 
the flying-fish on his way to Bermuda. So I leave 
him in peace. 

The most beautiful thing I have seen at sea, all the 
more so that I had never heard of it, is the trail of a 
shoal of fish through the phosphorescent water. It 
is like a flight of silver rockets, or the streaming of 
northern lights through that silent nether heaven. I 
thought nothing could go beyond that rustling star- 
foam which was churned up by our ship's bows, or 
those eddies and disks of dreamy flame that rose and 
wandered out of sight behind us. 

'T was file our slii]-) was plunsring tlirough, 
Cold fiiv that o'er the quarter Hew ; 
And wandering moons of idle flame 
Grew full ami waned, and went and came, 
Dappling with light tlie huge sea snake 
That slid behind'us in the wake. 

But there was something even more delicately rare 
in the apparition of the fish, as they turned up in 
gleaming furrows the latent moonshine which the 
ocean seemed to have hoarded against these vacant 
interlunar nio;hts. In the Mediterranean one day, as 
we were lying becalmed, I observed the water freckled 
with dingy specks, which at last gathered to a pink- 
ish scum on the surface. The sea had been so phos- 
phorescent for some nights, that when the Captain 
gave me my bath, by dousing me with buckets from 
the house on deck, the spray flew off my head and 



AT SEA. 105 

shoulders in sparks. It occurred to me that this dirty- 
looking scum might be the luminous matter, and I had 
a pailful dipped up to keep till after dark. When I 
went to look at it after nightfall, it seemed at first 
perfectly dead; but when I shook it, the whole broke 
out into what I can only liken to milky flames, whose 
lambent silence was strangely beautiful, and startled 
me almost as actual projection might an alchemist. I 
could not bear to be the death of so much beauty; so 
I poured it all overboard again. 

Another sight worth taking a voyage for is that of 
the sails by moonlight. Our course was "south and 
by east, half south," so that we seemed bound for the 
full moon as she rolled up over our wavering horizon. 
Then I used to go forward to the bowsprit and look 
back. Our ship was a clipper, with every rag set, 
stunsails, sky-scrapers, and all; nor was it easy to 
believe that such a wonder could be built of canvas as 
that white many-storied pile of cloud that stooped 
over me, or drew back as we rose and fell with the 
waves. 

These are all the wonders I can recall of my five 
weeks at sea, except the sun. Were you ever alone 
with the sun? You think it a very simple question; 
but I never was, in the full sense of the word, till I was 
held up to him one cloudless day on the broad buckler 
of the ocean. I suppose one might have the same 
feeling in the desert. I remember getting something 
like it years ago, when I climbed alone to the top of a 
mountain, and lay face up on the hot gray moss, 
striving to get a notion of how an Arab might feel. It 



I06 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

was my American commentary of the Koran, and not 
a bad one. In a New England winter, too, when 
everything is gagged with snow, as if some gigantic 
physical geographer were taking a cast of the earth's 
face in plaster, the bare knob of a hill will introduce 
you to the sun as a comparative stranger. But at sea 
you may be alone with him day after day, and almost 
all day long. I never understood before that nothing 
short of full daylight can give the supremest sense of 
solitude. Darkness will not do so, for the imagina- 
tion peoples it with more shapes than ever were poured 
from the frozen loins of the populous North. The 
sun, I sometimes think, is a little grouty at sea, espe- 
cially at high noon, feeling that he wastes his beams on 
those fruitless furrows. It is otherwise with the moon. 
She "comforts the night," as Chapman finely says, 
and I always found her a companionable creature. 

In the ocean-horizon I took untiring delight. It 
is the true magic-circle of expectation and conjecture 
— almost as good as a wishing-ring. What will rise 
over that edge we sail toward daily and never over- 
take? A sail? an island? the new shore of the Old 
World ? Something rose every day, which I need not 
have gone so far to see, but at whose levee I was a 
much more faithful courtier than on shore. A cloud- 
less sunrise in mid-ocean is beyond comparison for 
simple grandeur. It is like Dante's style, bare and 
perfect. Naked sun meets naked sea, the true classic 
of nature. There may be more sentiment in morning 
on shore, — the shivering fairy-jewelry of dew, the 
silver point-lace of sparkling hoar-frost, — but there 



AT SEA. 107 

is also more complexity, more of the romantic. The 
one savors of the elder Edda, the other of the Minne- 
singers. 

And I thus floating, lonely elf, 

A kind of planet by myself, 

The mists draw up and furl away, 

And in the east a warming gray, 

Faint as the tint of oaken woods 

When o'er their buds Way breathes and broods, 

Tells that the golden sunrise-tide 

Is lapsing up earth's thirsty side. 

Each moment purpling on the crest 

Of some stark billow farther west : 

And as the sea-moss droops and hears 

The gurgling flood that nears and nears. 

And then with tremulous content 

Floats out each thankful filament. 

So waited I until it came, 

God's daily miracle, — O shame 

That 1 had seen so many days 

Unthankful, without wondering praise. 

Not recking more this bliss of earth 

Than the cheap fire that lights my hearth! 

But now glad thoughts and holy pour 

Into my heart, as once a year 

To San Miniato's open door, 

In long procession, chanting clear. 

Through slopes of sun, through shadows hoar, 

The coupled monks slow-climbing sing, 

And like a golden censer swing 

From rear to front, from front to rear 

Their alternating bursts of praise. 

Till the roof's fading seraphs gaze 

Down through an odorous mist, that crawls 

Lingeringly up the darkened walls 

And the dim arches, silent long. 

Are startled with triumphant song. 

I wrote yesterday that the sea still rimmed our 
prosy lives with mystery and conjecture. But one 
is shut up on shipboard like Montaigne in his tower, 
with nothing to do but to review his own thoughts and 



I08 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

contradict himself. Dire^ redire, et me contredire, 
will be the staple of my journal till I see land. I say 
nothing of such matters as the montagna hruna on 
which Ulysses wrecked; but since the sixteenth cen- 
tury could any man reasonably hope to stumble on one 
of those wonders which were cheap as dirt in the days 
of St. Saga? Faustus, Don Juan, and Tanhauser are 
the last ghosts of legend, that lingered almost till the 
Gallic cock-crow of universal enliglitenment and dis- 
illusion. The Public School has done for Imagina- 
tion. What shall I see in Outre-Mer, or on the way 
thither, but what can be seen with eyes? To be 
sure, I stick by the sea-serpent, and would fain believe 
that science has scotched, not killed him. Nor is he 
to be lightly given up, for, like the old Scandinavian 
snake, he binds together for us the two hemispheres 
of Past and Present, of Belief and Science. He is the 
link which knits us seaboard Yankees with our Norse 
progenitors, interpreting between the age of the dragon 
and that of the railroad-train. We have made ducks 
and drakes of that large estate of wonder and delight 
bequeathed to us by ancestral vikings, and this alone 
remains to us unthrift heirs of Linn. 

I feel an undefined respect for a man who has seen 
the sea-serpent. He is to his brother-fishers what 
the poet is to his fellow-men. Where they have seen 
nothing better than a school of horse-mackerel, or the 
idle coils of ocean around Half-way Rock, he has 
caught authentic glimpses of the withdrawing mantle- 
hem of the Edda age. I care not for the monster him- 
self. It is not the thing, but the belief in the thing, 



AT SEA, 109 

that is dear to me. May it be long before Professor 
Owen is comforted with the sight of his unfleshed 
vertebra, long before they stretch many a rood behind 
Kimball's or Barnum's glass, reflected in the shallow 
orbs of Mr. and Airs. Public, which stare, but see not ! 
When we read that Captain Spalding, of the pink- 
stern Three Follies, has beheld him rushing through 
the brine like an infinite series of bewitched mackerel 
casks, we feel that the mystery of old Ocean, at least, 
has not yet been sounded, — that Faith and Awe 
survive there tinevaporate. I once ventured the 
horse-mackerel theory to an old fisherman, browner 
than a tomcod. *'Hos-mackril !" he exclaimed in- 
dignantly, "hos-mackrilbe — " (here he used aphrase 
commonly indicated in laical literature by the same 
sign which serves for Doctorate in Divinity), "don't 
yer spose I know a hos-mackril?" The intonation 
of that "/" would have silenced Professor Monk- 
barns Owen with his provoking phoca forever. What 
if one should ask him if he knew a trilobite ? 

The fault of modern travellers is, that they see 
nothing out of sight. They talk of eocene periods 
and tertiary formations, and tell us how the world 
looked to the plesiosaur. They take science (or 
nescience) with them, instead of that soul of generous 
trust their elders had. All their senses are sceptics and 
doubters, materialists reporting things for other scep- 
tics to doubt still further upon. Nature becomes a 
reluctant witness upon the stand, badgered with geolo- 
gist hammers and phials of acid. There have been 
no travellers since those included in Hakluyt and 



no FIRESIDE TRAVEIS. 

Purchas, except Martin, perhaps, who saw an inch 
or two into the invisible at the Orkneys. We have 
peripatetic lecturers, but no more travellers. Trav- 
ellers' stories are no longer proverbial. We have 
picked nearly every apple (wormy or otherwise) 
from the world's tree of knowledge, and that without 
an Eve to tempt us. Two or three have hitherto 
hung luckily beyond reach on a lofty bough shadow- 
ing the interior of Africa, but there is a German Doc- 
tor at this very moment pelting at them with sticks and 
stones. It miay be only next week, and these too, 
bitten by geographers and geologists, will be thrown 
away. 

Analysis is carried into everything. Even Deity is 
subjected to chemic tests. We must have exact 
knowledge, a cabinet stuck full of facts pressed, dried, 
or preserved in spirits, instead of the large, vague 
world our fathers had. With them science was 
poetry; with us, poetry is science. Our modern 
Eden is a hortus siccus. Tourists defraud rather 
than enrich us. They have not that sense of aesthetic 
proportion which characterized the elder traveller. 
Earth is no longer the fine work of art it was, for noth- 
ing is left to the imagination. Job Hortop, arrived 
at the height of the Bermudas, thinks it full time to 
indulge us in a merman. Nay, there is a story told 
by Webster, in his "Witchcraft," of a merman with a 
mitre, who, on being sent back to his watery diocese 
of finland, made what advances he could toward an 
episcopal benediction by bowing his head thrice. 
Doubtless he had been consecrated by St. Antony of 



A r SEA. I I I 

Padua. A dumb bishop would be sometimes no 
unpleasant phenomenon, by the way. Sir John 
Hawkins is not satisfied with telling us about the 
merely sensual Canaries, but is generous enough to 
throw us in a handful of ''certain flitting islands" to 
boot. Henry Hawkes describes the visible Mexican 
cities, and then is not so frugal but that he can give 
us a few invisible ones. Thus do these generous 
ancient mariners make children of us again. Their 
successors show us an earth effete and past bearing, 
tracing out with the eyes of industrious fleas every 
wrinkle and crowfoot. 

The journals of the elder navigators are prose 
Odysseys. The geographies of our ancestors were 
works of fancy and imagination. They read poems 
where we yawn over items. Their world was a huge 
wonder-horn, exhaustless as that which Thor strove 
to drain. Ours would scarce quench the small 
thirst of a bee. No modern voyager brings back the 
magical foundation stones of a Tempest. No Marco 
Polo, traversing the desert beyond the city of Lok, 
would tell of things able to inspire the mind of Milton 
with 

" Calling shapes and beckoning shadows dire, 
And airy tongues that syllable men's names 
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses." 

It was easy enough to believe the story of Dante, 
when two thirds of even the upper-world were yet un- 
traversed and unmapped. With every step of the 
recent traveller our inheritance of the wonderful is 
diminished. Those beautifully pictured notes of the 



112 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

Possible are redeemed at a ruinous discount in the 
hard and cumbrous coin of the Actual. How are we 
not defrauded and impoverished? Does California 
vie with El Dorado ? or are Bruce's Abyssinian kings 
a set-ofif for Prester John? A bird in the bush is 
worth two in the hand. And if the philosophers have 
not even yet been able to agree whether the world 
has any existence independent of ourselves, how do 
we not gain a loss in every addition to the catalogue 
of Vulgar Errors? Where are the fishes which nidi- 
ficated in trees? Where the monopodes sheltering 
themselves from the sun beneath their single um- 
brella-like foot, — umbrella-like in everything but 
the fatal necessity of being borrowed? Where the 
Acephali, with whom Herodotus, in a kind of ecstasy, 
wound up his climax of men with abnormal top- 
pieces? Where the Roc whose eggs are possibly 
boulders, needing no far-fetched theory of glacier or 
iceberg to account for them? Where the tails of the 
men of Kent ? Where the no legs of the bird of para- 
dise ? Where the Unicorn, with that single horn of his, 
sovereign against all manner of poisons ? Where the 
Fountain of Youth? Where that Thessalian spring, 
which, without cost to the country, convicted and 
punished perjurers? Where the Amazons of Orel- 
lana? All these, and a thousand other varieties, we 
have lost, and have got nothing instead of them 
And those who have robbed us of them have stolen 
that which not enriches themselves. It is so much 
wealth cast into the sea beyond all approach of diving- 
bells. We owe no thanks to Mr. J. E. Worcester, 



AT SEA. 113 

whose Geography we studied enforcedly at school. 
Yet even he had his relentings, and in some softer 
moment vouchsafed us a fine, inspiring print of 
the Maelstrom, answerable to the twenty-four mile 
diameter of its suction. Year by year, more and 
more of the world gets disenchanted. Even the icy 
privacy of the arctic and antarctic circles is invaded. 
Our youth are no longer ingenious, as indeed no 
ingenuity is demanded of them. Everything is ac- 
counted for, everything cut and dried, and the world 
may be put together as easily as the fragments of a 
dissected map. The Mysterious bounds nothing 
now on the North, South, East, or West. We have 
played Jack Horner with our earth, till there is never 
a plum left in it. 



IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 

The first sight of a shore so historical as that of 
Europe gives an American a strange thrill. What 
we always feel the artistic want of at home, is back- 
ground. It is all idle to say we are Englishmen, and 
that English history is ours too. It is precisely in 
this that we are not Englishmen, inasmuch as we only 
possess their history through our minds, and not by 
life-long association with a spot and an idea we call, 
England. History without the soil it grew in, is more 
instructive than inspiring, — an acquisition, and not 
an inheritance. It is laid away in our memories, and 
does not run in our veins. Surely, in all that concerns 
aesthetics, Europeans have us at an immense advan- 
tage. They start at a point which we arrive at after 
weary years, for literature is not shut up in books, nor 
art in galleries: both are taken in by unconscious 
absorption through the finer pores of mind and char- 
acter in the atmosphere of society. We are not yet 
out of our Crusoe-hood, and must make our own 
tools as best we may. Yet I think we shall find the 
good of it one of these days, in being thrown back 
more wholly on nature; and our literature, when we 
have learned to feel our own strength, and to respect 
our own thought because it is ours, and not because 
the European Mrs. Grundy agrees with it, will have 
114 



IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. II5 

a fresh flavor and a strong body that will recommend 
it, especially as what we import is watered more and 
more liberally with every vintage. 

My first glimpse of Europe was the shore of Spain. 
Since we got into the Mediterranean, we have been 
becalmed for some days within easy view of it. All 
along are fine mountains, brown all day, and with a 
bloom on them at sunset like that of a ripe plum. 
Here and there at their feet little white towns are 
sprinkled along the edge of the water, like the grains 
of rice dropped by the princess in the story. Some- 
times we see larger buildings on the mountain slopes, 
probably convents. I sit and wonder whether the 
farther peaks may not be the Sierra Morena (the 
rusty saw) of Don Quixote. I resolve that they shall 
be, and am content. Surely latitude and longitude 
never showed me any particular respect, that I should 
be over-scrupulous with them. 

But after all. Nature, though she may be more 
beautiful, is nowhere so entertaining as in man, and 
the best thing I have seen and learned at sea is our 
Chief Mate. My first acquaintance with him was 
made over my knife, which he asked to look at, and, 
after a critical examination, handed back to me, say- 
ing, "I should n't wonder if that 'ere was a good piece 
o' stuff." Since then he has transferred a part of his 
regard for my knife to its owner. I like folks who 
like an honest bit of steel, and take no interest what- 
ever in "your Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff." 
There is always more than the average human nature 
in a man who has a hearty sympathy with iron. It 



lib FIRESIDE TRAVEIS. 

is a manly metal, with no sordid associations like gold 
and silver. My sailor fully came up to my expecta- 
tion on further acquaintance. He might well be called 
an old salt who had been wrecked on Spitzbergen 
before I was born. He was not an Amierican, but I 
should never have guessed it by his speech, which was 
the purest Cape Cod, and I reckon myself a good 
taster of dialects. Nor was he less Americanized in 
all his thoughts and feelings, a singular proof of the 
ease with which our omnivorous country assimilates 
foreign matter, provided it be Protestant, for he was 
a man ere he became an American citizen. He used 
to walk the deck with his hands in his pockets, in 
seeming abstraction, but nothing escaped his eye. 
How he saw, I could never make out, though I had a 
theory that it was with his elbows. After he had taken 
me (or my knife) into his confidence, he took care 
that I should see whatever he deemed of interest to a 
landsman. Without looking up, he would say, sud- 
denly, "Ther 's a whale blowin' clearn up to win'ard," 
or, "Them 's porpises to leeward: that means change 
o' wind." He is as impervious to cold as a polar bear, 
and paces the deck during his watch much as one of 
those yellow hummocks goes slumping up and down 
his cage. On the Atlantic, if the wind blew a gale 
from the northeast, and it was cold as an EngHsh 
summer, he was sure to turn out in a calico shirt and 
trousers, his furzy brown chest half bare, and slippers, 
without stockings. But lest you might fancy this to 
have chanced by defect of wardrobe, he comes out 
in a monstrous pea-jacket here in the Mediterranean, 



IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. \\J 

when the evening is so hot that Adam would have 
been glad to leave off his fig-leaves. *'It 's a kind o' 
damp and unwholesome in these ere waters," he says, 
evidently regarding the Midland Sea as a vile standing 
pool, in comparison with the bluff ocean. At meals 
he is superb, not only for his strengths, but his weak- 
nesses. He has somehow or other come to think me 
a wag, and if I ask him to pass the butter, detects an 
occult joke, and laughs as much as is proper for a mate. 
For you must know that our social hierarchy on ship- 
board is precise, and the second mate, were he present, 
would only laugh half as much as the first. Mr. X. 
always combs his hair, and works himself into a black 
frock-coat (on Sundays he adds a waistcoat) before 
he comes to meals, sacrificing himself nobly and pain- 
fully to the social proprieties. The second mate, on 
the other hand, who eats after us, enjoys the privilege 
of shirt-sleeves, and is, I think, the happier man of 
the two. We do not have seats above and below the 
salt, as in old time, but above and below the white 
sugar. Mr. X. always takes brown sugar, and it is 
delightful to see how he ignores the existence of cer- 
tain delicates which he considers above his grade, 
tipping his head on one side with an air of abstraction, 
so that he may seem not to deny himself, but to omit 
helping himself from inadvertence or absence of mind. 
At such times he wrinkles his forehead in a peculiar 
manner, inscrutable at first as a cuneiform inscrip- 
tion, but as easily read after you once get the key. 
The sense of it is something like this: "I, X., know 
my place, a height of wisdom attained by few. What- 



Il8 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

ever you may think, I do not see that currant jelly, 
nor that preserved grape. Especially, a kind Provi- 
dence has made me blind to bowls of white sugar, and 
deaf to the pop of champagne corks. It is much that 
a merciful compensation gives me a sense of the 
dingier hue of Havana, and the muddier gurgle of 
beer. Are there potted meats? My physician has 
ordered me three pounds of minced salt-junk at every 
meal." There is such a thing, you know, as a ship's 
husband: X. is the ship's poor relation. 

As I have said, he takes also a below-the-white- 
sugar interest in the jokes, laughing by precise point 
of compass, just as he would lay the ship's course, all 
yawing being out of the question with his scrupulous 
decorum at the helm. Once or twice, I have got the 
better of him, and touched him off into a kind of com- 
promised explosion, like that of damp fireworks, that 
splutter and simmer a little, and then go out with pain- 
ful slowness and occasional relapses. But his fuse 
is always of the unwillingest, and you must blow your 
match, and touch him off again and again with the 
same joke. Or rather, you must magnetize him 
many times to get him en rapport with a jest. This 
once accomplished, you have him, and one bit of fun 
will last the whole voyage. He prefers those of one 
syllable, the a-h abs of humor. The gradual fattening 
of the steward, a benevolent mulatto with whiskers 
and ear-rings, who looks as if he had been meant for 
a woman, and had become a man by accident, as in 
some of those stories of the elder physiologists, is an 
abiding topic of humorous comment with Mr. X. 



IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. I19 

"That 'ere stooard," he says, with a brown grin Hke 
what you might fancy on the face of a serious and aged 
seal, *"s agittin' as fat 's a porpis. He was as thin 's 
a shingle when he come aboord last v'yge. Them 
trousis '11 bust yit. He don't darst take 'em off 
nights, for the whole ship's company could n't git 
him into 'em agin." And then he turns aside to enjoy 
the intensity of his emotion by himself, and you hear 
at intervals low rumblings, an indigestion of laughter. 
He tells me of St. Elmo's fires, Marvell's corposants, 
though with him the original corpos santos has suf- 
fered a sea change, and turned to comepleasants, 
pledges of fine weather. I shall not soon find a 
pleasanter companion. It is so delightful to meet a 
man who knows just what you do not. Nay, I think 
the tired mind finds something in plump ignorance 
like what the body feels in cushiony moss. Talk of 
the sympathy of kindred pursuits ! It is the sympathy 
of the upper and nether millstones, both forever grind- 
ing the same grist, and wearing each other smooth. 
One has not far to seek for book -nature, artist- 
nature, every variety of superinduced nature, in 
short, but genuine human nature is hard to find. 
And how good it is ! Wholesome as a potato, fit 
company for any dish. The freemasonry of culti- 
vated men is agreeable, but artificial, and I like 
better the natural grip with which manhood recog- 
nizes manhood. 

X. has one good story, and with that I leave him, 
wishing him with all my heart that little inland farm 
at last which is his calenture as he paces the windy 



I20 FIRESIDE TRAVEIS. 

deck. One evening, when the clouds looked wild 
and whirling, I asked X. if it was coming on to blow. 
"No, I guess not," said he; "bumby the moon '11 
be up, and scoff away that 'ere loose stuff." His 
intonation set the phrase "scoff away" in quotation- 
marks as plain as print. So I put a query in each 
eye, and he went on. "Ther' was a Dutch cappen 
onct, an' his mate come to him in the cabin, where 
he sot takin' his schnapps, an' says, 'Cappen, it's 
agittin' thick, an' looks kin' o' squally; hed n't we 's 
good's shorten sail?' 'Gimmy my alminick,' says 
the cappen. So he looks at it a spell, an' says he, 
' The moon 's due in less 'n half an hour, an' she '11 
scoff away ev'ythin' clare agin.' So the mate he goes, 
an' bumby down he comes agin, an' says, 'Cappen, 
this 'ere 's the allfiredest, powerfullest moon 't ever 
you did see. She 's scoffed away the maintogallants'l, 
an' she 's to work on the foretops'l now. Guess you 'd 
better look in the alminick agin, an' fin' out when this 
moon sets.' So the cappen thought 't was 'bout 
time to go on deck. Dreadful slow them Dutch 
cappens be." And X. walked away, rumbhng in- 
wardly, like the rote of the sea heard afar. 

And so we arrived at Malta. Did you ever hear 
of one of those eating-houses, where, for a certain fee, 
the guest has the right to make one thrust with a fork 
into a huge pot, in which the whole dinner is bubbling, 
getting perhaps a bit of boiled meat, or a potato, or else 
nothing ? Well, when the great caldron of war is 
seething, and the nations stand round it striving to 
fish out something to their purpose from the mess, 



IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 121 

Britannia always has a great advantage in her trident. 
Malta is one of the titbits she has impaled with that 
awful implement. I was not sorry for it, when I 
reached my clean inn, with its kindly English land- 
lady. 



ITALY. 

Thf impulse which sent the Edelmann Storg and 
me to Subiaco was given something hke two thousand 
years ago. Had we not seen the Ponte Sant' Antonio, 
we should not have gone to Subiaco at this particular 
time; and had the Romans been worse masons, or 
more ignorant of hydrodynamics than they were, we 
should never have seen the Ponte Sant' Antonio. 
But first we went to TivoH, — two carriage -loads of 
us, a very agreeable mixture of English, Scotch, and 
Yankees, — on Tuesday, the 20th April. I shall not 
say anything about Tivoli. A water-fall in type is 
likely to be a trifle stiffish. Old association and 
modern beauty; nature and artifice; worship that 
has passed away and the religion that abides forever; 
the green gush of the deeper torrent and the white 
evanescence of innumerable cascades, delicately pal- 
pitant as a fall of northern Hghts; the descendants 
of Sabine pigeons flashing up to immemorial dove- 
cots, for centuries inaccessible to man, trooping with 
noisy rooks and daws : the fitful roar and the silently 
hovering iris, which, borne by. the wind across the 
face of the cliff, transmutes the travertine to momen- 
tary opal, and whose dimmer ghost haunts the moon- 
light, — as well attempt to describe to a Papuan 
savage that wondrous ode of Wordsworth which 
rouses and stirs in the soul all its dormant instincts 
122 



ITALY. 123 

of resurrection as with a sound of the last trumpet. 
No, it is impossible. Even Byron's pump sucks 
sometimes, and gives an unpleasant dry wheeze, es- 
pecially, it seems to me, at Terni. It is guide-book 
poetry, enthusiasm manufactured by the yard, which 
the hurried traveller (John and Jonathan are always 
in a hurry when they turn peripatetics) puts on when 
he has not a rag of private imagination to cover his 
nakedness withal. It must be a queer kind of love 
that could "watch madness with unalterable mien," 
when the patient, whom any competent physician 
would have ordered into a strait-waistcoat long ago, 
has shivered himself to powder down a precipice. 
But there is no madness in the matter. Velino goes 
over in his full senses, and knows perfectly well that 
he shall not be hurt, that his broken fragments will 
reunite more glibly than the head and neck of Orrilo. 
He leaps exultant, as to his proper doom and fulfil- 
ment, and out of the mere waste and spray of his glory 
the god of sunshine and song builds over the crown- 
ing moment of his destiny a triumphal arch beyond 
the reach of time and of decay. But Milton is the 
only man who has got much poetry out of a cataract, 

— and that was a cataract in his eye. 

The first day we made the Giro, coming back to a 
merry dinner at the Sibilla in the evening. Then we 
had some special tea, — for the Italians think tea- 
drinking the chief religious observance of the Inglesi, 

— and then we had fifteen pauls' worth of illumina- 
tion, which wrought a sudden change in the scenery, 
like those that seem so matter-of-course in dreams, 



124 FIRESIDE TRAVEIS. 

turning the Claude we had seen in the morning into a 
kind of Piranesi-Rembrandt. The illumination, by 
the way, which had been preiigured to us by the en- 
thusiastic Italian who conducted it as something 
second only to the Girandola, turned out to be one 
blue-light, and two armfuls of straw. 

The Edelmann Storg is not fond of pedestrian 
locomotion, — nay, I have even sometimes thought 
that he looked upon the invention of legs as a private 
and personal wrong done to himself. I am quite sure 
that he inwardly believes them to have been a conse- 
quence of the fall, and that the happier Pre-Adam- 
ites were monopodes, and incapable of any but a 
vehicular progression. A carriage, with horses and 
driver complete, he takes to be as simple a production 
of nature as a potato. But he is fond of sketching 
and after breakfast, on the beautiful morning of Wed- 
nesday, the 2ist, I persuaded him to walk out a mile 
or two and see a fragment of aqueduct ruin. It is a 
single glorious arch, buttressing the mountain -side 
upon the edge of a sharp descent to the valley of the 
Anio. The old road to Subiaco passes under it, and 
it is crowned by a crumbling tower built in the Mid- 
dle Ages (whenever that was) against the Gaetani. 
While Storg sketched, I clambered. Below you, 
where the valley widens greenly toward other moun- 
tains, which the ripe Italian air distances with a 
bloom like that on unplucked grapes, are more arches, 
ossified arteries of what was once the heart of the 
world. Storg's sketch was highly approved of by 
Leopoldo, our guide, and by three or four peasants, 



ITALY. 125 

who, being on their way to their morning's work in the 
fields, had, of course, nothing in particular to do, and 
stopped to see us see the ruin. Any one who has re- 
marked how grandly the Romans do nothing will be 
slow to believe them an effete race. Their style is 
as the colossal to all other, and the name of Eternal 
City fits Rome also, because time is of no account 
in it. The Roman always waits as if he could afford 
it amply, and the slow centuries move quite fast 
enough for him. Time is to other races the field of a 
task -master, which they must painfully till; but to 
the Roman it is an entailed estate, which he enjoys 
and will transmit. The Neapohtan's laziness is that 
of a loafer ; the Roman's is that of a noble. The poor 
Anglo-Saxon must count his hours, and look twice at 
his small change of quarters and minutes; but the 
Roman spends from a purse of Fortunatus. His 
■piccolo quarto d'ora is like his grosso, a huge piece of 
copper, big enough for a shield, which stands only 
for a half-dime of our money. We poor fools of time 
always hurry as if we were the last type of man, the 
full stop with which Fate was closing the Colophon 
of her volume, — as if we had just read in our news- 
paper, as we do of the banks on holidays, f^^The 
world will close to-day at twelve o'clock, an hour 
earlier than usual. But the Roman is still an Ancient, 
with a vast future before him to tame and occupy. 
He and his ox and his plough are just as they were in 
Virgil's time or Ennius's. We beat him in many 
things; but in the impregnable fastness of his great 
rich nature he defies us. 



126 FIRESIDE TRAVEIS. 

We got back to Tivoli, — Storg affirming that he 
had walked fifteen miles. We saw the Temple of 
Cough, which is not the Temple of Cough, though it 
might have been a votive structure put up by some 
Tiburtine Dr. Wistar. We saw the villa of Mecaenas, 
which is ;:j/ the villa of Mecsenas, and other equally 
satisfactory antiquities. All our Enghsh friends 
sketched the Citadel, of course, and one enthusiast 
attempted a likeness of the fall, which I unhappily 
mistook afterward for a semblance of the tail of on? 
of the horses on the Monte Cavallo. Then we wc;it 
to the Villa d' Este, famous on Ariosto's account, — 
and which Ariosto never saw. But the laurels were 
worthy to have made a chaplet for him, and the 
cypresses and the views were as fine as if he had seen 
them every day of his life. 

Perhaps something I learned in going to see one of 
the gates of the town is more to the purpose, and may 
assist one in erecting the horoscope of Italia Unita. 
When Leopoldo first proposed to drag me through 
the mud to view this interesting piece of architecture, 
I demurred. But as he was very earnest about it, and 
as one seldom fails getting at a bit of character by sub- 
mitting to one's guide, I yielded. Arrived at the spot, 
he put me at the best point of view, and said, — 

"Behold, Lordship!" 

**I see nothing out of the common," said I. 

"Lordship is kind enough here to look at a gate, 
the like of which exists not in all Italy, nay, in the 
whole world, — I speak not of England," for he 
thought me an Inglese. 



ITALY. 127 

" I am not blind, Leopoldo ; where is the 
miracle?" 

" Here we dammed up the waters of the Anio, first 
by artifice conducted to this spot, and, letting them 
out upon the Romans, who stood besieging the town, 
drowned almost a whole army of them. (Lordship 
conceives?) They suspected nothing till they found 
themselves all torn to pieces at the foot of the hill 
yonder. (Lordship conceives?) Eh! per Bacco! we 
watered their porridge for them." 

Leopoldo used we as Lord Buchan did /, meaning 
any of his ancestors. 

"But tell me a little, Leopoldo, how many years is 
it since this happened?" 

"Non saprei, signoria; it was in the antiquest 
times, certainly; but the Romans never come to our 
Fair, that we don't have blows about it, and perhaps a 
stab or two. Lordship understands?" 

I was quite repaid for my pilgrimage. I think I 
understand Italian politics better for hearing Leo- 
poldo speak of the Romans, whose great dome is in 
full sight of TivoU, as a foreign nation. But what 
perennial boyhood the whole story indicates ! 

Storg's sketch of the morning's ruin was so success- 
ful that I seduced him into a new expedition to the 
Ponte Sant' Antonio, another aqueduct arch about 
eight miles off. This was for the afternoon, and I 
succeeded the more easily, as we were to go on horse- 
back. So I told Leopoldo to be at the gate of the 
Villa of Hadrian, at three o'clock, with three horses. 
Leopoldo' s face, when I said three, was worth seeing; 



128 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

for the poor fellow had counted on nothing more than 
trotting beside our horses for sixteen miles, and getting 
half a dollar in the evening. Between doubt and 
hope, his face seemed to exude a kind of oil, which 
made it shine externally, after having first lubricated 
all the muscles inwardly. 

''With three horses, Lordship?" 

"Yes, ihreer 

"Lordship is very sagacious. With three horses 
they go much quicker. It is finished, then, and they 
will have the kindness to find me at the gate with the 
beasts, at three o'clock precisely." 

Leopoldo* and I had compromised upon the term 
"Lordship." He had found me in the morning cele- 
brating due rites before the Sibyl's Temple with strange 
incense of the nicotian herb, and had marked me for 
his prey. At the very high tide of sentiment, when 
the traveller lies with oyster-like openness in the soft 
ooze of reverie, do these parasitic crabs, the ciceroni^ 
insert themselves as his inseparable bosom companions. 
Unhappy bivalve, lying so softly between thy two 
shells, of the actual and the possible, the one sustain- 
ing, the other widening above thee, till, oblivious of 
native mud, thou fanciest thyself a proper citizen only 
of the illimitable ocean which floods thee, -^ there is 
no escape ! Vain are thy poor crustaceous efforts at 
self-isolation. The foe henceforth is a part of thy 
consciousness, thy landscape, and thyself, happy only 
if that irritation breed in thee the pearl of patience 
and of voluntary abstraction. 

"Excellency wants a guide, very experienced, who 



ITALY. 129 

has conducted with great mutual satisfaction many of 
his noble compatriots." 

Puff, puff, and an attempt at looking as if I did not 
see him. 

"Excellency will deign to look at my book of testi- 
monials. When we return. Excellency will add his 
own." 

Puff, puff. 

"Excellency regards the cascade, prcEceps Anio, as 
the good Horatius called it." 

I thought of the dissolve frigus of the landlord in 
Roderick Random, and could not help smiling. Leo- 
poldo saw his advantage. 

"Excellency will find Leopoldo, when he shall 
choose to be ready." 

"But I will positively not be called Excellency. I 
am not an ambassador, nor a very eminent Christian, 
and the phrase annoys me." 

"To be sure, Excell — Lordship." 

"I am an American." 

"Certainly, an American, Lordship," — as if that 
settled the matter entirely. If I had told him I was a 
Caff re, it would have been just as clear to him. He 
surrendered the "Excellency," but on general prin- 
ciples of human nature, I suppose, would not come a 
step lower than "Lordship." So we compromised on 
that. — P.S. It is wonderful how soon a republican 
ear reconciles itself with syllables of this description. 
I think citizen would find greater difficulties in the 
way of its naturalization, and as for brother — ah ! 
well, in a Christian sense, certainly. 



I30 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

Three o'clock found us at the Villa of Hadrian. 
We had explored that incomparable ruin, and conse- 
crated it, in the Homeric and Anglo-Saxon manner, by 
eating and drinking. Some of us sat in the shadow 
of one of the great walls, fitter for a city than a palace, 
over which a Nile of ivy, gushing from one narrow 
source, spread itself in widening inundations. A 
happy few listened to stories of Bagdad from Mrs. 
, whose silver hair gleamed, a palpable anachro- 
nism, like a snow-fall in May, over that ever youthful 
face, where the few sadder lines seemed but the signa- 
ture of Age to a deed of quitclaim and release. Dear 
Tito, that exemplary traveller who never lost a day, 
had come back from renewed explorations, convinced 
by tlie eloquent custode that Serapeion was the name 
of an off'icer in the Praetorian Guard. I was explain- 
ing, in addition, that Natimachia, in the Greek tongue, 
signified a place artificially drained, when the horses 
were announced. 

This put me to reflection. I felt, perhaps, a little 
as Mazeppa must, when told that his steed was at the 
door. For several years I had not been on the back 
of a horse, and was it not more than likely that these 
mountains might produce a yet more refractory breed 
of these ferocious animals than common ? Who could 
tell the effect of grazing on a volcanic soil like that 
hereabout? I had vague recollections that the saddle 
nullified the laws governing the impulsion of inert 
bodies, exacerbating the centrifugal forces into a 
virulent activity, and proportionably narcotizing the 
centripetal. The phrase ratio proportioned to the 



ITALY. 131 

squares of the distances impressed me with an awe 
wliich explained to me how the laws of nature had 
been of old personified and worshipped. Meditating 
these things, I walked with a cheerful aspect to 
the gate, where my saddled and bridled martyrdom 
awaited me. 

'' Eccomi qua!''^ said Leopoldo, hilariously. "Gen- 
tlemen will be good enough to select from the three 
best beasts in Tivoli." 

"O, this one will serve me as well as any," said I, 
with an air of indifiference, much as I have seen a 
gentleman help himself inadvertently to the best 
peach in the dish. I am not more selfish than becomes 
a Christian of the nineteenth century, but I looked 
on this as a clear case of tabula in naufragio, and had 
noticed that the animal in question had that tremulous 
droop of the lower Hp which indicates senility, and 
the abdication of the wilder propensities. Moreover, 
he was the only one provided with a curb bit, or rather 
with two huge iron levers which might almost have 
served Archimedes for his problem. Our saddles 
were fia;t cushions covered with leather, brought by 
years of friction to the highest state of polish. In- 
stead of a pommel, a perpendicular stake, about ten 
inches high, rose in front, which, in case of a stumble, 
would save one's brains, at the risk of certain eviscera- 
tion. Behind, a glary slope invited me constantly to 
slide over the horse's tail. The selfish prudence of my 
choice had well-nigh proved the death of me, for this 
poor old brute, with that anxiety to oblige a joresticro 
which characterizes everybody here, could never make 



132 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

up his mind which of his four paces (and he had the 
rudiments of four — walk, trot, rack, and gallop) 
would be most agreeable to me. The period of tran- 
sition is always unpleasant, and it was all transition. 
He treated me to a hodge-podge of all his several gaits 
at once. Saint Vitus was the only patron saint I could 
think of. My head jerked one way, my body another, 
while each of my legs became a pendulum vibrating 
furiously, one always forward while the other was 
back, so that I had all the appearance and all the 
labor of going afoot, and at the same time was bumped 
within an inch of my life. Waterton's alligator was 
nothing to it ; it was like riding a hard-trotting arma- 
dillo bare-backed. There is a species of equitation 
peculiar to our native land, in which a rail from the 
nearest fence, with no preliminary incantation of 
Horse and hattock ! is converted into a steed, and this 
alone may stand the comparison. Storg in the mean- 
while was triumphantly taking the lead, his trousers 
working up very pleasantly above his knees, an insur- 
rectionary movement which I also was unable to sup- 
press in my own. I could bear it no longer. 

"Le-e-o-o-p-o-o-o-l-l-l-d-d-o-o-o !" jolted I. 

"Command, Lordship ! " and we both came to a stop. 

"It is necessary that we change horses immediately, 
or I shall be jelly." 

"Certainly, Lordship" ; and I soon had the pathetic 
satisfaction of seeing him subjected to all the excruci- 
ating experiments that had been tried upon myself. 
Fiat experimentum in corpore vili, thought his ex- 
tempore lordship, Christopher Sly, to himself. 



ITALY. 133 

Meanwhile all the other accessories of our ride were 
delicious. It was a clear, cool day, and we soon left 
the high road for a bridle-path along the side of the 
mountain, among gigantic olive-trees, said to be five 
hundred years old, and which had certainly employed 
all their time in getting into the weirdest and wonder- 
fullest shapes. Clearly in this green commonwealth 
there was no heavy roller of public opinion to flatten 
all character to a lawn-like uniformity. Everything 
was individual and eccentric. And there was some- 
thing fearfully human, too, in the wildest contortions. 
It was some such wood that gave Dante the hint of his 
human forest in the seventh circle, and I should have 
dreaded to break a twig, lest I should hear that voice 
complaining, 

" Perche mi scerpi ? 
Non hai tu spirto di pietate alcuno ? " 

Our path lay along a kind of terrace, and at every 
opening we had glimpses of the billowy Campagna, 
with the great dome bulging from its rim, while on our 
right, changing ever as we rode, the Alban mountain 
showed us some new grace of that sweeping outline 
peculiar to volcanoes. At intervals the substructions 
of Roman villas would crop out from the soil like 
masses of rock, and deserving to rank as a geological 
formation by themselves. Indeed, in gazing into these 
dark caverns, one does not think of man more than at 
Staffa. Nature has adopted these fragments of a race 
who were dear to her. She has not suffered these 
bones of the great Queen to lack due sepulchral rites, 
but has flung over them the ceremonial handfuls of 



134 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

earth, and every year carefully renews the garlands of 
memorial flowers. Nay, if what they say in Rome 
be true, she has even made a new continent of the 
Colosseum, and given it a jiora of its own. 

At length, descending a little, we passed through 
farm-yards and cultivated fields, where, from Leo- 
poldo's conversations with the laborers, we discov- 
ered that he himself did not know the way for which 
he had undertaken to be guide. However, we pres- 
ently came to our ruin, and very noble it was. The 
aqueduct had here been carried across a deep gorge, 
and over the little brook which wimpled along below 
towered an arch, as a bit of Shakespeare bestrides 
the exiguous rill of a discourse which it was intended 
to ornament. The only human habitation in sight 
was a little casetta on the top of a neighboring hill. 
What else of man's work could be seen was a ruined 
castle of the Middle Ages, and, far away, upon the 
horizon, the eternal dome. A valley in the moon 
could scarce have been lonelier, could scarce have sug- 
gested more strongly the feeling of preteriteness and 
extinction. The stream below did not seem so much 
to sing as to murmur sadly, Conclusum est; periisti! 
and the wind, sighing through the arch, answered, 
Periisti ! Nor was the silence of Monte Cavi without 
meaning. That cup, once full of fiery wine, in which 
it pledged Vesuvius and .-^tna later born, was brimmed 
with innocent water now. Adam came upon the 
earth too late to see the glare of its last orgy, lighting 
the eyes of saurians in the reedy Campagna below. I 
almost fancied I could hear a voice like that which cried 



ITALY. 135 

to the Egyptian pilot, Great Pan is dead! I was look- 
ing into the dreary socket where once glowed the eye 
that saw the whole earth vassal. Surely, this was the 
world's autumn, and I could hear the feet of Time 
rustling through the wreck of races and dynasties, 
cheap and inconsiderable as fallen leaves. 

But a guide is not engaged to lead one into the 
world of imagination. He is as deadly to sentiment as 
a snifif of hartshorn. His position is a false one, Hke 
that of the critic, who is supposed to know everything, 
and expends himself in showing that he does not. If 
you should ever have the luck to attend a concert of 
the spheres, under the protection of an Italian cicerone, 
he will expect you to listen to him rather than to it. 
He will say: "Ecco, Signoria, that one in the red 
mantle is Signor Mars, eh ! what a noblest basso is 
Signor Mars ! but nothing (Lordship understands ?) 
to what Signor Saturn used to be, (he with the golden 
belt, Signoria,) only his voice is in ruins now, — 
scarce one note left upon another; but Lordship can 
see what it was by the remains, Roman remains, 
Signor m, Roman remains, the work of giants. (Lord- 
ship understands?) They make no such voices now. 
Certainly, Signor Jupiter (with the yellow tunic, there) 
is a brave artist and a most sincere tenor; but since 
the time of the Republic" (if he think you an oscu- 
rante, or since the French, if he suspects you of being 
the least red) "we have no more good singing." And 
so on. 

It is a well-known fact to all persons who are in the 
habit of climbing Jacob's-ladders, that, if any one 



136 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

speak to you during the operation, the fabric collapses, 
and you come somewhat uncomfortably to the ground. 
One can be hit with a remark, when he is beyond the 
reach of more material missiles. Leopoldo saw by 
my abstracted manner that I was getting away from 
him, and I was the only victim he had left, for Storg 
was making a sketch below. So he hastened to fetch 
me down again. 

"Nero built this arch, Lordship." (He did n't, 
but Nero was Leopoldo's historical scape-goat.) 
"Lordship sees the dome? he will deign to look the 
least little to the left hand. Lordship has much in- 
telligence. Well, Nero always did thus. His works 
a,lways, always,, had Rome in view." 

He had already shown me two ruins, which he 
ascribed equally to Nero, and which could only have 
seen Rome by looking through a mountain. How- 
ever, such trifles are nothing to an accomplished guide. 

I remembered his quoting Horace in the morning. 

"Do you understand Latin, Leopoldo?" 

"I did a httle once. Lordship. I went to the 
Jesuits' school at Tivoli. But what use of Latin to a 
poverino hke me?" 

"Were you intended for the church? Why did 
you leave the school?" 

"Eh, Lordship!" and one of those shrugs which 
might mean that he left it of his own free will, or that 
he was expelled at point of toe. He added some con- 
temptuous phrase about the priests. 

"But, Leopoldo, you are a good Catholic?" 

"Eh, Lordship, who knows? A man is no blinder 



ITALY. 137 

for being poor, — nay, hunger sharpens the eyesight 
sometimes. The cardinals (their Eminences !) tell 
us that it is good to be poor, and that, in proportion 
as we lack on earth, it shall be made up to us in Para- 
dise. Now, if the cardinals (their Eminences !) be- 
lieve what they preach, why do they want to ride in 
such handsome carriages?" 

"But are there many who think as you do?" 

''Everybody, Lordship, but a few women and 
fools. What imports it what the fools think?" 

An immense deal, I thought, an immense deal; 
for of what material is public opinion manufactured ? 

"Do you ever go to church?" 

"Once a year. Lordship, at Easter, to mass and 
confession." 

"Why once a year?" 

"Because, Lordship, one must have a certificate 
from the priest. One might be sent to prison else, 
and one had rather go to confession than to jail. Eh, 
Lordship, it is a porcheria.^^ 

It is proper to add, that in what Leopoldo said of 
the priests he was not speaking of his old masters, the 
Jesuits. One never hears anything in Italy against 
the purity of their lives, or their learning and ability, 
though much against their unscrupulousness. Nor 
will any one who has ever enjoyed the gentle and 
dignified hospitality of the Benedictines be ready to 
believe any evil report of them. 

By this time Storg had finished his sketch, and we 
remounted our grazing steeds. They were brisker 
as soon as their noses were turned homeward, and we 



138 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

did the eight miles back in an hour. The setting sun 
streamed through and among the Michael Angelesque 
olive-trunks, and, through the long colonnade of the 
bridle-path, fired the scarlet waistcoats and bodices 
of homeward villagers, or was sullenly absorbed in the 
long black cassock and flapped hat of a priest, who 
courteously saluted the strangers. Sometimes a min- 
gled flock of sheep and goats (as if they had walked 
out of one of Claude's pictures) followed the shepherd 
who, satyr-like, in goat-skin breeches, sang such songs 
as were acceptable before Tubal Cain struck out the 
laws of musical time from his anvil. The peasant, in 
his ragged brown cloak, or with blue jacket hanging 
from the left shoulder, still strides Romanly, — incedit 
rex, — and his eyes have a placid grandeur, inherited 
from those which watched the glittering snake of the 
Triumph, as it undulated along the Via Sacra. By 
his side moves with equal pace his woman-porter, the 
caryatid of a vast entablature of household-stuff, and 
learning in that harsh school a sinuous poise of body 
and a security of step beyond the highest snatch ot the 
posture-master. 

As we drew near Tivoli the earth was fast swinging 
into shadow. The darkening Campagna, climbing 
the sides of the nearer Monticelli in a gray belt of 
olive-spray, rolled on towards the blue island of 
Soracte, behind which we lost the sun. Yes, we had 
lost the sun; but in the wide chimney of the largest 
room at the Sibilla there danced madly, crackling 
with ilex and laurel, a bright ambassador from Sun- 
land, Monsieur Le Feu, no pinchbeck substitute for 



ITALY, 139 

his royal master. As we drew our chairs up, after 
the dinner due to Leopoldo's forethought, ''Behold," 
said I, "the Resident of the great king near the court 
of our (this-day-created) Hogan Moganships." 

We sat looking into the fire, as it wavered from 
shining shape to shape of unearthliest fantasy, and 
both of us, no doubt, making out old faces among the 
embers, for we both said together, "Let us talk of old 
times." 

"To the small hours," said the Edelmann: "and 
instead of blundering off to Torneo to intrude chatter- 
ingly upon the midnight privacy of Apollo, let us pro- 
mote the fire, there, to the rank of sun by brevet, and 
have a kind of undress rehearsal of those night 
wanderings of his here upon the ample stage of the 
hearth." 

So we went through the whole catalogue of Do you 
remembers? and laughed at all the old stories, so 
dreary to an outsider. Then we grew pensive, and 
talked of the empty sockets in that golden band of 
our young friendship, — of S., with Grecian front, 
iDut unsevere, and Saxon M., to whom laughter wls 
as natural as for a brook to ripple. 

But Leopoldo had not done with us. We were 
to get back to Rome in the morning, and to that end 
must make a treaty with the company which ran the 
Tivoli diligence, the next day not being the regular 
period of departure for that prodigious structure. 
We had given Leopoldo twice his fee, and, setting a 
mean value upon our capacities in proportion, he ex- 
pected to bag a neat percentage on our bargain. 



I40 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

Alas! he had made a false estimate of the Anglo- 
Norman mind, which, capable of generosity as a com- 
pliment to itself, will stickle for the dust in the balance 
in a matter of business, and would blush at being done 
by Mercury himself. 

Accordingly, at about nine o'clock there came a 
knock at the door, and, answering our Favorisca! in 
stalked Leopoldo, gravely followed by the two com- 
missioners of the company. 

"Behold me returned. Lordship, and these men are 
the Vetturini.'^ 

Why is it that men who have to do with horses are 
the sam^ all over Christendom? Is it that they 
acquire equine characteristics, or that this particular 
mystery is magnetic to certain sorts of men? Cer- 
tainly they are marked unmistakably, and these two 
worthies would have looked perfectly natural in York- 
shire or Vermont. They were just alike, — for- 
temque Gyan, jortemque Cloanthum, — and you could 
not split an epithet between them. Simultaneously 
they threw back their large overcoats, and displayed 
spheroidal figures, over which the strongly pronounced 
stripes of their plaided waistcoats ran like parallels 
of latitude and longitude over a globe. Simul- 
taneously they took off their hats and said, "Your 
servant, gentlemen." In Italy it is always necessary 
to make a comhinazione beforehand about even the 
most customary matters, for there is no fixed highest 
price for anything. For a minute or two we stood 
reckoning each other's forces. Then I opened the 
first trench with the usual, "How much do you wish 



ITALY. 141 

for carrying us to Rome at half past seven to-morrow 
morning?" 

The enemy glanced one at the other, and the 
result of this ocular witenagemot was that one said, 
"Four scudi, gentlemen." 

The Edelmann Storg took his cigar from his mouth 
in order to whistle, and made a rather indecorous 
allusion to four gentlemen in the diplomatic service 
of his Majesty, the Prince of the Powers of the Air. 

"Whe-ew! quattro diavolif" said he. 

"Macehef^ exclaimed I, attempting a flank move- 
ment, "I had rather go on foot!" and threw as much 
horror into my face as if a proposition had been made 
to me to commit robbery, murder, and arson all 
together. 

"For less than three scudi and a half the diligence 
parts not from Tivoli at an extraordinary hour," 
said the stout man, with an imperturbable gravity, 
intended to mask his retreat, and to make it seem that 
he was making the same proposal as at first. 

Storg saw that they wavered, and opened upon 
them with his flying artillery of sarcasm. 

"Do you take us for Inglesi? We are very well 
here, and will stay at the Sibilla," he snififed scornfully. 

"How much will Lordship give?" (This was 
showing the white feather.) 

"Fifteen pauls," (a scudo and a half,) "buonamano 
included." 

"It is impossible, gentlemen; for less than two 
scudi and a half the diligence parts not from Tivoli at 
an extraordinary hour." 



142 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

"Fifteen pauls." 

''Will Lordship give two scudi?" (with a slight 
flavor of mendicancy.) 

"Fifteen pauls," (growing firm as we saw them 
waver.) 

"Then, gentlemen, it is all over; it is impossible, 
gentlemen." ■ 

"Very good; a pleasant evening to you !" and they 
bowed themselves out. 

As soon as the door closed behind them, Leopoldo, 
who had looked on in more and more anxious silence 
as the chance of plunder was whittled shmmer and 
slimmer by the sharp edges of the parley, saw instantly 
that it was for his interest to turn state's evidence 
against his accomplices. 

"They will be back in a moment," he said know- 
ingly, as if he had been of our side all along. 

"Of course; we are aware of that." — It is always 
prudent to be aware of everything in travelling. 

And, sure enough, in five minutes re-enter the stout 
men, as gravely as if everything had been thoroughly 
settled, and ask respectfully at what hour we would 
have the diligence. 

This will serve as a specimen of Italian bargain- 
making. They do not feel happy if they get their 
first price. So easy a victory makes them sorry they 
had not asked twice as much, and, besides, they love 
the excitement of the contest. I have seen as much 
debate over a little earthen pot (value two cents) on 
the Ponte Vecchio, in Florence, as would have served 
for an operation of millions in the funds, the demand 



ITALY, 143 

and the offer alternating so rapidly that the litigants 
might be supposed to be playing the ancient game 
■ of morra. It is a part of the universal fondness for 
gaming, and lotteries. An English gentleman once 
asked his Italian courier how large a percentage he 
made on all of his employer's money which passed 
through his hands. "About five per cent; some- 
times more, sometimes less," was the answer. "Well, 
I will add that to your salary, in order that I maybe 
rid of this uncomfortable feehng of being cheated." 
The courier mused a moment, and said, "But no, sir, 
I should not be happy ; then it would not be sometimes 
more, sometimes less, and I should miss the excite- 
ment of the game." 

2 id. — This morning the diligence was at the door 
punctually, and, taking our seats in the coupe, we bade 
farewell to La Sibilla. But first we ran back for a 
parting glimpse at the water-fall. These last looks, 
like lovers' last kisses, are nouns of multitude, and 
presently the povero stalliere, signori, waited upon us, 
cap in hand, telling us that the vettiirino was impa- 
tient, and begging for drink -money in the same 
breath. Leopoldo hovered longingly afar, for these 
vultures respect times and seasons, and while one is 
fleshing his beak upon the foreign prey, the others 
forbear. The passengers in the diligence were not 
very lively. The Romans are a grave people, and 
more so than ever since '49. Of course, there was 
one priest among them. There always is; for the 
mantis religiosa is as inevitable to these public con- 
veyances as the curculio is to the plum, and one could 



144 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

almost fancy that they were bred in the same way, — 
that the egg was inserted when the vehicle was green, 
became developed as it ripened, and never left it till 
it dropped withered from the pole. There was noth- 
ing noticeable on the road to Rome, except the strings 
of pack-horses and mules which we met returning 
with empty lime-sacks to Tivoli, whence comes the 
supply of Rome. A railroad was proposed, but the 
government would not allow it, because it would inter- 
fere with this carrying-trade, and wisely granted 
instead a charter for a road to Frascati, where there 
was no business whatever to be interfered with. 
About a mile of this is built in a style worthy of ancient 
Rome ; and it is possible that eventually another mile 
may be accomphshed, for some half-dozen laborers 
are at work upon it with wheelbarrows, in the leisurely 
Roman fashion. If it is ever finished, it will have 
nothing to carry but the conviction of its own useless- 
ness. A railroad has been proposed to Civita Vecchia ; 
but that is out of the question because it would be 
profitable. On the whole, one does not regret the 
failure of these schemes. One would not approach 
the soHtary emotion of a lifetime, such as is the first 
sight of Rome, at the rate of forty miles an hour. It 
is better, after painfully crawhng up one of those long 
paved hills, to have the postilion turn in his saddle 
and, pointing with his whip, (without looking, for he 
knows instinctively' where it is,) say, Ecco San Pietro ! 
Then you look tremblingly, and see it hovering vision- 
ary on the horizon's verge, and in a moment you are 
rattling and rumbling and wallowing down into the 



ITALY. 145 

valley, and it is gone. So you play hide-and-seek 
with it all the rest of the way, and have time to con- 
verse with your sensations. You fancy you have got 
used to it at last ; but from the next hill-top, lo, there 
it looms again, a new wonder, and you do not feel 
sure that it will keep its tryst till you find yourself 
under its shadow. The Dome is to Rome what 
Vesuvius is to Naples; only a greater wonder, for 
Michael Angelo hung it there. The traveller climbs 
it as he would a mountain, and finds the dwellings 
of men high up on its sacred cliffs. It has its annual 
eruption, too, at Easter, when the fire trickles and 
palpitates down its mighty shoulders, seen from far- 
off Tivoh. — No, the locomotive is less impertinent 
at Portici, hailing the imprisoned Titan there with a 
kindred shriek. Let it not vex the solemn Roman 
ghosts, or the nobly desolate Campagna, with whose 
soHtudes the shattered vertebrae of the aqueducts are 
in truer sympathy. 

2/\th. — To-day our journey to Subiaco properly 
begins. The jocund morning had called the beggars 
to their street -corners, and the women to the win- 
dows; the players of morra (a game probably as old 
as the invention of fmgers), of chuck-farthing, and of 
bowls, had cheerfully begun the labors of the day; 
the plaintive cries of the chair-seaters, frog-venders, 
and certain other peripatetic merchants, the meaning 
of whose vocal advertisem.ents I could never pene- 
trate, quaver at regular intervals, now near and now 
far away ; a solitary Jew with a sack over his shoulder, 
and who never is seen to stop, slouches along, every 



146 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

now and then croaking a penitential Cenci! as if he 
were somehow the embodied expiation (by some post- 
Ovidian metamorphosis) of that darkest Roman 
tragedy; women are bargaining for lettuce and 
endive; the slimy Triton in the Piazza Barberina 
spatters himself with vanishing diamonds; a peasant 
leads an ass on which sits the mother with the babe in 
lier arms, — a living flight into Egypt ; in short, the 
beautiful spring day had awakened all of Rome that 
can awaken yet (for the ideal Rome waits for another 
morning), when we rattled along in our carrettella on 
the way to Palestrina. A carrettella is to the per- 
fected vehicle, as the coracle to the steamship; it is 
the first crude conception of a wheeled carriage. 
Doubtless the inventor of it was a prodigious genius 
in his day, and rode proudly in it, envied by the more 
fortunate pedestrian, and cushioned by his own in- 
flated imagination. If the chariot of Achilles were 
like it, then was Hector happier at the tail than the son 
of Thetis on the box. It is an oblong basket upon 
two wheels, with a single seat rising in the middle. 
We had not jarred over a hundred yards of the Quattro 
Fontane, before we discovered that no elastic pro- 
pugnaculum had been interposed between the body 
and the axle, so that v/e sat, as it were, on paving- 
stones, mitigated only by so much as well -seasoned 
ilex is less flinty-hearted than tiijo or breccia. If there 
were any truth in the theory of developments, I am 
certain that we should have been furnished with a 
pair of rudimentary elliptical springs, a I least, before 
half our day's journey was over. However, as one of 



ITALY. 147 

those happy illustrations of ancient manners, which 
one meets with so often here, it was instructive; for 
I now clearly understand that it was not merely by 
reason of pomp that Hadrian used to be three days 
in getting to his villa, only twelve miles off. In spite 
of the author of "Vestiges," Nature, driven to ex- 
tremities, can develop no more easy cushion than a 
blister, and no doubt treated an ancient emperor and 
a modern republican with severe impartiality. 

It was difficult to talk without biting one's tongue; 
but as soon as we had got fairly beyond the gate, and 
out of sight of the last red-legged French soldier, and 
tightly-buttoned doganiere, our driver became loqua- 
cious. 

"I am a good Cathohc, — better than most," said 
he, suddenly. 

"What do you mean by that?" 

"Eh! they say Saint Peter wrought miracles, and 
there are enough who don't believe it; but / do. 
There 's the Barberini Palace, — behoM one miracle 
of Saint Peter ! There 's tlie Farnese, — behold 
another ! There 's the Borghcse, — behold a third ! 
But there 's no end of them. No saint, nor all tlie 
saints put together, ever worked so many wonders as 
he; and then, per Bacco ! he is the uncle of so many 
folks, — why, that 's a miracle in itself, and of the 
greatest!" 

Presently he added : "Do you know how we shall treat 
the priests when v/e make our next revolution? Vv^'e 
shall treat them as they treat us, and that is after the 
fashion of the buffalo. For the buffalo is not content 



148 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

with getting a man down, but after that he gores him 
and thrusts him, always, always, as if he wished to 
cram him to the centre of the earth. Ah, if I were only 
keeper of hell-gate ! Not a rascal of them all should 
ever get out into purgatory while I stood at the 
door!" 

We remonstrated a little, but it only exasperated 
him the more. 

'* Blood of Judas! they will eat nothing else than 
gold, when a poor fellow's belly is as empty as San 
Lorenzo yonder. They '11 have enough of it one of 
these days — but melted ! How do you think they 
will Hke it for soup?" 

Perhaps, if our vehicle had been blessed with springs 
our vetturino would have been more placable. I con- 
fess a growing moroseness in myself, and a wander- 
ing speculation or two as to the possible fate of the 
builder of our chariot in the next world. But I am 
more and more persuaded every day, that, as far as 
the popular mind is concerned, Romanism is a dead 
thing in Italy. It survives only because there is noth- 
ing else to replace it with, for men must wear their old 
habits (however threadbare and out at the elbows) 
till they get better. It is literally a superstition, — 
a something left to stand over till the great commercial 
spirit of the nineteenth century balances his accounts 
again, and then it will be banished to the limbo of 
profit and loss. The Papacy lies dead in the Vatican, 
but the secret is kept for the present, and government 
is carried on in its name. After the fact gets abroad, 
perhaps its ghost will terrify men a little while longer, 



ITAL V. 149 

but only while they are in the dark, though the ghost 
of a creed is a hard thing to give a mortal wound to, 
and may be laid, after all, only in a Red Sea of blood. 

So we rattled along till we came to a large albergo 
just below the village of Colonna. While our horse 
was taking his rinfresco, we climbed up to it, and 
found it desolate enough, — the houses never rebuilt 
since Consul Rienzi sacked it five hundred years ago. 
1l was a kind of gray incrustation on the top of the 
hill, chiefly inhabited by pigs, chickens, and an old 
woman with a distaff, who looked as sacked and 
ruinous as ever}^thing around her. There she sat in 
the sun, a dreary, doting Clotho, who had outlived 
her sisters, and span endless destinies which none 
was left to cut at the appointed time. Of course she 
paused from her work a moment, and held out a 
skinny hand, with the usual, "Noblest gentlemen, 
give me something for charity." We gave her 
enough to pay Charon's ferriage across to her sisters, 
and departed hastily, for there was something un- 
canny about the place. In this climate even the 
finger-marks of Ruin herself are indelible, and the 
walls were still blackened with Rienzi' s fires. 

As we vvaited for our carreUella, I saw four or five 
of the lowest-looking peasants come up and read the 
handbill of a tombola (a kind of lottery) which was 
stuck up beside the inn-door. One of them read it 
aloud for our benefit, and with remarkable propriety 
of accent and emphasis. This benefit of clergy, how- 
ever, is of no great consequence where there is nothing 
to read. In Rome, this morning, the walls were 



I50 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

spattered with placards condemning the works of 
George Sand, Eugene Sue, Gioberti, and others. 
But in Rome one may contrive to read any book he 
hkes; and I know Itahans who are famiHar with 
Swedenborg, and even Strauss. 

Our stay at the albergo was illustrated by one other 
event, — a nightingale singing in a full-blossomed 
elder-bush on the edge of a brook just across the road. 
So hquid were the notes, and so full of spring, that the 
twig he tilted on seemed a conductor through which 
the mingled magnetism of brook and blossom flowed 
into him and were precipitated in music. Nature 
understands thoroughly the value of contrasts, and 
accordingly a donkey from a shed hard by, hitched 
and hesitated and agonized through his bray, so that 
we might be conscious at once of the positive and 
negative poles of song. It was pleasant to see with 
what undoubting enthusiasm he went through his 
solo, and vindicated Providence from the imputation 
of weakness in making such trifles as the nightingale 
yonder. *' Give ear, O heaven and earth ! " he seemed 
to say, *'nor dream that good, sound common-sense 
is« extinct or out of fashion so long as / live." I sup- 
pose Nature made the donkey half abstractedly, while 
she was feeling her way up to her ideal in the horse, 
and that his bray is in like manner an experimental 
sketch for the neigh of her iinished animal. 

We drove on to Palestrina, passing for some dis- 
tance over an old Roman road, as carriageable as 
when It was built. Palestrina occupies the place of 
the once famous Temple of Fortune, v/hose ruins 



ITAL Y. 151 

are perhaps a fitter monument of the fickle goddess 
than ever the perfect fane was. 

Come hither, weary ghosts tliat wail 
O'er buried Nimroud's carven walls, 

And ye whose nightly footsteps frail 

From the dread hu--.h of Memphian halls 
Lead forth tlie whispering funerals ! 

Come hither, shade of ancient pain 
That, muffled sitting, hear'st the foam 

To death-deaf Carthage shout in vain, 
And thou that in the Sibyl's tome 
Tear-stain'st the never after Rome ! 

Come, Marius, Wolsey, all ye great 

On whom proud Fortime stamped her heel, 

And see herself the sport of Fate, 

Herself discrowned and made to feel 
The treason of her slippery wheel ! 

One climbs through a great part of the town by 
stone steps, passing fragments of Pelasgic wall, (for 
history, like geology, may be studied here in succes- 
sive rocky strata,) and at length reaches the inn, called 
the Cappellaro, the sign of which is a great tin cardi- 
nal's hat, swinging from a small building on the other 
side of the street, so that a better view of it may be 
had from the hostelry itself. The landlady, a stout 
woman of about sixty years, welcomed us heartily, 
and burst forth into an eloquent eulogy on some fresh 
sea-fish which she had just received from Rome. She 
promised everything for dinner, leaving us to choose; 
but as a skilful juggler flitters the cards before you, 
and, while he seems to offer all, forces upon you the 
one he wishes, so we found that whenever we under- 
took to select from her voluble bill of fare, we had in 



152 FIRESIDE TRAVEIS, 

some unaccountable manner always ordered sea- 
fish. Therefore, after a few vain efforts, we con- 
tented ourselves, and, while our dinner was cooking, 
climbed up to the top of the town. Here stands the 
deserted Palazzo Barberini, in which is a fine Roman 
mosaic pavement. It was a dreary old place. On 
the ceilings of some of the apartments were fading out 
the sprawling apotheoses of heroes of the family, 
(themselves long ago faded utterly,) who probably went 
through a somewhat different ceremony after their 
deaths from that represented here. One of the rooms 
on the ground-floor was still occupied, and from its 
huge grated windows there swelled and subsided at 
intervals a confused turmoil of voices, some talking, 
some singing, some swearing, and some lamenting, as 
if a page of Dante's Inferno had become suddenly 
alive under one's eye. This was the prison, and in 
front of each window a large stone block allowed tHe- 
ci'tete discourses between the prisoners and their 
friends outside. Behind the palace rises a steep, 
rocky hill, with a continuation of ruined castle, the 
innocent fastness now of rooks and swallows. We 
walked down to a kind of terrace, and watched the 
Alban Mount (which saw the sunset for us by proxy) 
till the bloom trembled nearer and nearer to its sum- 
mit, then went wholly out, we could not say when, 
and day was dead. Simultaneously we thought of 
dining, and clattered hastily down to the Cappellaro. 
We had to wait yet half an hour for dinner, and from 
where I sat I could see through the door of the dining- 
room a kind of large hall into which a door from the 



ITALY. 153 

kitchen also opened. Presently I saw the landlady- 
come out with a little hanging lamp in her hand, and 
seat herself amply before a row of baskets ranged 
upside-down along the wall. She carefully lifted the 
edge of one of these, and, after she had groped in it a 
moment, I heard that hoarse choking scream peculiar 
to fowls when seized by the leg in the dark, as if their 
throats were in their tibiae after sunset. She took out 
a fine young cock and set him upon his feet before 
her, stupid with sleep, and blinking helplessly at the 
lamp, which he perhaps took for a sun in reduced 
circumstances, doubtful whether to crow or cackle. 
She looked at him admiringly, felt of him, sighed, 
gazed sadly at his coral crest, and put him back again. 
This ceremony she repeated with five or six of the 
baskets, and then went back into the kitchen. I 
thought of Thessalian hags and Arabian enchantresses, 
and wondered if these were transformed travellers — 
for travellers go through queer transformations some- 
times. Should Storg and I be crowing and scratching 
to-morrow morning, instead of going to Subiaco? 
Should we be Plato's men, with the feathers, instead 
of without them? I would probe this mystery. So, 
when the good woman came in to lay the table, I asked 
what she had been doing with the fowls. 

"I thought to kill one for the gentlemen's soup; 
but they were so beautiful my heart failed vna. Still, 
if the gentlemen wish it — only I thought two pigeons 
would be more delicate." 

Of course we declined to be accessory to such a 
murder, and she went off delighted, returning in a 



154 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

few minutes with our dinner. First we had soup, 
then a roasted kid, then boiled pigeons, (of which the 
soup had been made,) and last the pesci di mare, which 
were not quite so great a novelty to us as to our good 
hostess. However, hospitality, like so many other 
things, is reciprocal, and the guest must bring his half, 
or it is naught. The prosperity of a dinner lies in the 
heart of him that eats it, and an appetite twelve miles 
long enabled us to do as great justice to the fish as if 
we were crowding all Lent into our merl. The land- 
lady came and sat by us; a large and serious cat, 
winding her great tail around her, settled herself com- 
fortably on the table, licking her paws now and then, 
with a poor relation's look at the fish; a small dog 
sprang into an empty chair, and a large one, with 
very confidential manners, would go from one to the 
other of us, laying his paw upon our arms as if he had 
an important secret to communicate, and alternately 
pricking and drooping his ears in hope or despond- 
ency. The albergatrice forthwith began to tell us her 
story, — how she was a widow, how she had borne 
thirteen children, twelve still living, and how she re- 
ceived a pension of sixty scudi a year, under the old 
Roman law, for her meritoriousness in this respect. 
The portrait of the son she had lost hung over the 
chimney-place, and, pointing to it, she burst forth into 
the following dro'l threnody. The remarks in paren- 
thesis v/ere screamed through the kitchen -door, v/hich 
stood ajar, or addressed personally to us. 

''O my son, my son ! the doctors killed him, just as 
truly as if they had poisoned him ! O how beautiful 



ITALY. 155 

he was! beautiful! beautiful !! beautiful!!! (Are 
not those fish done yet?) 'Look, that is his Hkeness, — 
but he was handsomer. He was as big as that" (ex- 
tending her arms), — "big breast, big shoulders, big 
sides, big legs! (Eat 'em, eat 'em, they won't hurt 
you, fresh sea-fish, fresh! fresh /I fresh!!!) I told 
them the doctors had murdered him, when they car- 
ried him with torches! He had been hunting, and 
brought home some rabbits, I remember, for he was 
not one that ever came empty-handed, and got the 
fever, and you treated him for consumption, and killed 
him ! (Shall I come out there, or will you bring some 
more fish?)" So she went on, talking to herself, to 
us, to the little serva in the kitchen, and to the medi- 
cal profession in general, repeating every epithet three 
times, with increasing emphasis, till her voice rose to' 
a scream, and contriving to mix up her living children 
with her dead one, the fish, the doctors, the serva, and 
the rabbits, till it was hard to say whether it was the 
fish that had large legs, whether the doctors had killed 
them, or the serva had killed the doctors, and whether 
the bello! hello!! hello!!! referred to her son or a 
particularly fine rabbit. 

2^th. — Having engaged our guide and horses the 
night before, we set out betimes this morning for Ole- 
vano. From Palestrina to Cavi the road winds along 
a narrow valley, following the course of a stream which 
rustles rather than roars below. Large chestnut-trees 
lean every way on the steep sides of the hills above us, 
and at every opening we could see great stretches of 
Campagna rolling away and away toward the bases of 



156 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

purple mountains streaked with snow. The sides of 
the road were drifted with* heaps of wild hawthorn 
and honeysuckle in full bloom, and bubbling with in- 
numerable nightingales that sang unseen. Overhead 
the sunny sky tinkled with larks, as if the frost in the 
air were breaking up and whirling away on the swollen 
currents of spring. 

Before long we overtook a little old man hobbling 
toward Cavi, with a bag upon his back. This was the 
mail ! Happy country, which Hurry and Worry have 
not yet subjugated ! Then we clattered up and down 
the narrow paved streets of Cavi, through the market 
place, full of men dressed all alike in blue jackets, blue 
breeches, and white stockings, who do not stare at 
the strangers, and so out at the farther gate. Now 
oftener and oftener we meet groups of peasants in 
gayest dresses, ragged pilgrims with staff and scallop, 
singing (horribly) ; then processions with bag-pipes 
and pipes in front, droning and squealing (horribly) ; 
then strings of two-wheeled carts, eight or nine in 
each, and in the first the priest, book in hand, setting 
the stave, and all singing (horribly). This must be 
inquired into. Gigantic guide, who, splendid with 
blue sash and silver knee-buckles, has contrived, by 
incessant drumming with his heels, to get his mule in 
front, is hailed. 

"Ho, Petruccio, what is the , meaning of all this 
press of people?" 

'^Festa, Lordship, at Genezzano." 

"What /^5to.?" 

"Of the Madonna, Lordship," and touches his hat, 



ITALY. 157 

for they are all dreadfully afraid of her for some reason 
or other. 

We are in luck, this being the great ]esla of the year 
among the mountains, — a thing which people go out 
of Rome to see. 

"Where is Genezzano?" 

''Just over yonder, Lordship," and pointed to the 
left, where was what seemed like a monstrous crystal- 
lization of rock on the crown of a hill, with three or 
four taller crags of castle towering in the midst, and 
all gray, except the tiled roofs, whose wrinkled sides 
were gold -washed with a bright yellow lichen, as if 
ripples, turned by some spell to stone, had contrived 
to detain the sunshine with which they were touched 
at the moment of transformation. 

The road, wherever it came into sight, burned with 
brilliant costumes, like an illuminated page of Frois- 
sart. Gigantic guide meanwhile shows an uncom- 
fortable and fidgety reluctance to turn aside and enter 
fairyland, which is wholly unaccountable. Is the huge 
earthen creature an Afrite, under sacred pledge to Sol- 
omon, and in danger of being sealed up again, if he 
venture near the festival of our Blessed Lady ? If so, 
that also were a ceremony worth seeing, and we insist. 
He wriggles and swings his great feet with an evident 
impulse to begin kicking the sides of his mule again 
and fly. The wa^ over the hills from Genezzano to 
Olevano he pronounces scomodissima, demanding of 
every peasant who goes by if it be not entirely impass- 
able. This leading question, put in all the tones of 
plausible entreaty he can command, meets the inva- 



158 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

riable reply, "£ scomoda, davvero ; ma per le bestie — 
e/i/" (it is bad, of a truth, but for the beasts — eh !) 
and then one of those indescribable shrugs, unintelli- 
gible at first as the compass to a savage, but in which 
the expert can make twenty hair's-breadth distinc- 
tions between N. E. and N. N. E. 

Finding that destiny had written it on his forehead, 
:he guide at last turned and went cantering and kick- 
ing toward Genezzano, we following. Just before 
you reach the town, the road turns sharply to the right, 
and, crossing a little gorge, loses itself in the dark gate- 
way. Outside the gate is an open space, which formi- 
cated with peasantry in every variety of costume that 
was not Parisian. Laughing women were climbing 
upon their horses (which they bestride like men) ; 
pilgrims were chanting, and beggars (the howl of an 
Italian beggar in the country is something terrible) 
howling in discordant rivalry. It was a scene lively 
enough to make Heraclitus shed a double allowance of 
tears; but our giant was still discomforted. As soon 
as we had entered the gate, he dodged into a litde back 
street, just as we were getting out of which the mys- 
tery of his unwillingness was cleared up. He had 
been endeavoring to avoid a creditor. But it so 
chanced (as Fate can hang a man with even a rope of 
sand) that the enemy was in position just at the end 
of this very lane, where it debouched into the Piazza 
of the town. 

The disputes of Italians are very droll things, and I 
will accordingly bag the one which is now imminent, 
as a specimen. They quarrel as unaccountably as 



ITAL V. 159 

dogs, who put their noses together, dislike each other's 
kind of smell, and instantly tumble one over the other, 
with noise enough to draw the eyes of a whole street. 
So these people burst out, without apparent prelimina- 
ries, into a noise and fury and war-dance which would 
imply the very utmost pitch and agony of exasperation, 
And the subsidence is as sudden. They explode each 
other on mere contact, as if by a law of nature, like 
two hostile gases. They do not grow warm, but leap 
at once from zero to some degree of white-heat, to in- 
dicate which no Anglo-Saxon thermometer of wrath 
is highly enough graduated. If I were asked to name 
one universal characteristic of an Italian town, I 
should say, two men clamoring and shaking them- 
selves to pieces at each other, and a woman leaning 
lazily out of a window, and perhaps looking at some- 
thing else. Till one gets used to this kind of thing, one 
expects some horrible catastrophe; but during eight 
months in Italy I have only seen blows exchanged 
thrice. In the present case the explosion was of harm' 
less gunpowder. 

"Why- haven't - you-paid-those-fifty-five-bajocchi at 
the-pizzicarolo's?'' began the adversary, speakino; 
with such inconceivable rapidity that he made only 
one word, nay, as it seemed, one monosyllable, of the 
whole sentence. Our giant, with a controversial gen 
ius which I should not have suspected in him, immc 
diately, and with great adroitness, changed the grounl 
of dispute, and, instead of remaining an insolvent 
debtor, raised himself at once to the ethical position of 
a moralist resisting an unjust demand from principle. 



l60 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

"It was only }orty-fiye,'' roared he. 

''But I say fifty-five," screamed the other, and 
shook his close-cropped head as a boy does an apple 
on the end of a switch, as if he meant presently to jerk 
it ofif at his antagonist. 

''BirboneT' yelled the guide, gesticulating so furi- 
ously with every square inch of his ponderous body 
that I thought he would throw his mule over, the poor 
beast standing all the while with drooping head and 
ears while the thunders of this man-quake burst over 
him. So feels the tortoise that sustains the globe 
when earth suffers fiery convulsions. 

"Birbantef retorted the creditor, and the oppro- 
brious epithet clattered from between his shaking jaws 
as a refractory copper is rattled out of a Jehoiada-box 
by a child. 

''Andate vi jar jriggere!" howled giant. 

''Andate ditto, ditto!" echoed creditor, — and be- 
hold, the thing is over ! The giant promises to attend 
to the affair when he comes back, the creditor returns 
to his booth, and we ride on. 

Speaking of Italian quarrels, I am tempted to paren- 
thesize here another which I saw at Civita Vecchia.' 
We had been five days on our way from Leghorn in a 
French steamer, a voyage performed usually, I think, 
in about thirteen hours. It was heavy weather, blow- 
ing what a sailor would call half a gale of wind, and 
the caution of our captain, not to call it fear, led him 
to put in for shelter first at Porto Ferrajo in Elba, and 
then at Santo Stefano on the Italian coast. Our little 
black water-beetle of a mail-packet was knocked 



ITALY. 1 61 

about pretty well, and all the Italia^ passengers dis- 
appeared in the forward cabin before we were out of 
port. When we were fairly at anchor within the har- 
bor of Civita Vecchia, they crawled out again, sluggish 
as winter flies, their vealy faces mezzotinted with soot. 
One of them presently appeared in the custom- 
house, his only luggage being a cage closely covered 
with a dirty red handkerchief, which represented his 
Hnen. 

"What have you in the cage?" asked the doganiere. 

"Eh! nothing other than a parrot." 

"There is a duty of one scudo and one bajoccho, 
then." 

'^ Santo diavolo! but what hoggishness ! " 

Thereupon instant and simultaneous blow-up, or 
rather a series of explosions, like those in honor of a 
Neapolitan saint's-day, lasting about ten minutes, and 
followed by as sudden quiet. In the course of it, the 
owner of the bird, playing irreverently on the first half 
of its name (pappagRllo), hinted that it would be a 
high duty for his Holiness himself {Papay. After a 
pause for breath, he said quietly, as if nothing had 
happened, "Very good, then, since I must pay, I will," 
and began fumbling for the money. 

"Meanwhile, do me the politeness to show me the 
bird," said the officer. 

"With all pleasure," and, lifting a corner of the 
handkerchief, there lay the object of dispute on his 
back, stone-dead, with his claws curled up helplessly 
on each side of his breast. I believe the owner would 
have been pleased had it even been his grandmother 



1 62 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

who had thus evaded duty, so exquisite is the pleasure 
of an ItaHan in escaping payment of anything. 

"I make a present of the poor bird," said he 
blandly. 

The publican, however, seemed to feel that he had 
been somehow cheated, and I left them in high debate, 
as to whether the bird were dead when it entered the 
custom-house, and, if it had been, whether a dead 
parrot were dutiable. Do not blame me for being en- 
tertained and trying to entertain you with these trifles. 
I remember Virgil's stern 

"Che p<.n- poco e che teco non mi risso," 

but Dante's journey was of more import to himself 
and others than mine. 

I am struck by the freshness and force of the pas- 
sions in Europeans, and cannot help feeling as if there 
were something healthy in it. When I think of the 
versatile and accommodating habits of America, it 
seems like a land without thunder-storms. In pro- 
portion a?S man grows commercial, does he also be- 
come dispassionate and incapable of electric emotions? 
The driving-wheels of all-powerful nature are in the 
back of the head, and, as man is the highest type of 
organization, so a nation is better or worse as it ad- 
vances toward the highest type of man, or recedes from 
it. But it is ill with a nation when the cerebrum sucks 
the cerebellum dry, for it cannot live by intellect alone. 
The broad foreheads always carry the day at last, but 
only when they are based on or buttressed with massive 
hind-heads. It would be easier to make a people 



ITALY. 163 

great in whom the animal is vigorous, than to keep one 
so after it has begun to spindle into over-intellectuality. 
The hands that have grasped dominion and held it 
have been large and hard; those from which it has 
slipped, delicate, and apt for the lyre and the pencil. 
Moreover, brain is always to be bought, but passion 
never comes to market. On the whole, I am rather 
inclined to like this European impatience and fire, 
even while I laugh at it, and sometimes find myself 
surmising whether a people who, like the Americans, 
put up quietly with all sorts of petty personal imposi- 
tions and injustices, will not at length find it too great 
a bore to quarrel with great public wrongs. 

Meanwhile, I must remember that I am in Genez- 
zano, and not in the lecturer's desk. We walked 
about for an hour or two, admiring the beauty and 
grand bearing of the women, and the picturesque vi- 
vacity and ever-renewing unassuetude of the whole 
scene. Take six of the most party-colored dreams, 
break them to pieces, put them into a fantasy-kaleido- 
scope, and when you look through it you will see some- 
thing that for strangeness, vividness, and mutability 
looked like the little Piazza of Genezzano seen from 
the church porch. As we wound through the narrow 
streets again to the stables where we had left our 
horses, a branch of laurel or ile.x would mark a wine- 
shop, and, looking till our eye cooled and toned itself 
down to dusky sympathy with the crypt, we could see 
the smoky interior sprinkled with white head-cloths 
and scarlet bodices, with here and there a yellow spot 
of lettuce or the red inward gleam of a wine-flask. 



164 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

The head-dress is precisely of that most ancient pat- 
tern seen on Egyptian statues, and so colossal are 
many of the wearers, that you might almost think you 
saw a party of young sphinxes carousing in the sunless 
core of a pyramid. 

We remounted our beasts, and, for about a mile, 
cantered gayly along a fine road, and then turned into 
a by-path along the flank of a mountain. Here the 
guide's strada scomodissima began, and we were forced 
to dismount, and drag our horses downward for a mile 
or two. We crossed a small plain in the valley, and 
then began to climb the opposite ascent. The path 
was perhaps four feet broad, and was paved with 
irregularly shaped blocks of stone, which, having been 
raised and lowered, tipped, twisted, undermined, and 
generally capsized by the rains and frosts of centuries, 
presented the most diabolically ingenious traps and 
pit-falls. All the while the scenery was beautiful. 
Mountains of every shape and hue changed their slow 
outlines ever as we moved, now opening, now closing 
around us, sometimes peering down solemnly at us 
over each other's shoulders, and then sinking slowly 
out of sight, or, at some sharp turn of the path, seem- 
ing to stride into the valley and confront us with their 
craggy challenge, — a challenge which the little val- 
leys accepted, if we did not, matching their rarest tints 
of gray and brown, and pink and purple, or that royal 
dye to make which all these were profusely melted 
together, for a moment's ornament, with as many 
shades of various green and yellow. Gray towns 
crowded and clung on the tops of peaks that seemed 



ITALY. 165 

inaccessible. We owe a great deal of picturesqueness 
to the quarrels and thieveries of the barons of the 
Middle Ages. The traveller and artist should put up 
a prayer for their battered old souls. It was to be out 
of their way and that of the Saracens that people were 
driven to make their homes in spots so sublime and 
inconvenient that the eye alone finds it pleasant to 
climb up to them. Nothing else but an American 
land-company ever managed to induce settlers upon 
territory of such uninhabitable quality. I have seen 
an insect that makes a mask for himself out of the 
lichens of the rock over which he crawls, contriving 
so to deceive the birds; and the towns in this wild 
region would seem to have been built on the same prin- 
ciple. Made of the same stone with the cliffs on which 
they perch, it asks good eyesight to make them out at 
the distance of a few miles, and every wandering 
mountain-mist annihilates them for the moment. 

At intervals, I could hear the giant, after digging at 
the sides of his mule with his spurless heels, growling 
to himself, and imprecating an apoplexy (accidente) 
upon the path and him who made it. This is the uni- 
versal malediction here, and once it was put into 
rhyme for my benefit. I was coming down the rusty 
steps of San Gregorio one day, and having paid no 
heed to a stout woman of thirty odd who begged some- 
what obtrusively, she screamed after me, 

" Ah, vi pigli un accidente, 
Voi che non date niente ! " 

Ah, may a sudden apoplexy, 

You who give not, come and vex ye ! 



1 66 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

Our guide could not long appease his mind with this 
milder type of objurgation, but soon intensified it into 
accidentaccio, which means a selected apoplexy of un- 
common size and ugliness. As the path grew worse 
and worse, so did the repetition of this phrase (for he 
was slow of invention) become more frequent, till at 
last he did nothing but kick and curse, — mentally, 
I have no doubt, including us in his malediction. I 
think it would have gratified Longinus or Fuseli (both 
of whom commended swearing) to have heard him. 
Before long we turned the flank of the hill by a little 
shrine of the Madonna, and there was Olevano just 
above us. Like the other towns in this district, it was 
the diadem of an abrupt peak of rock. From the 
midst of it jutted the ruins of an old stronghold of the 
Colonna. Probably not a house has been built in it 
for centuries. To enter the town, we literally rode 
up a long flight of stone steps, and soon found our- 
selves in the Piazza. We stopped to buy some cigars, 
and the zigararo, as he rolled them up, asked if we did 
not want dinner. We told him we should get' it at 
the inn. Benissimo, he would be there before us. 
What he meant, we could not divine; but it turned 
out that he was the landlord, and that the inn only 
became such when strangers arrived, relapsing again 
immediately into a private dwelling. We found our 
host ready to receive us, and went up to a large room 
on the first floor. . After due instructions, we seated 
ourselves at the open windows, — Storg to sketch, and 
I to take a mental calotype of the view. Among the 
many lovely ones of the day, this was the loveliest, — 



ITALY. 167 

or was it only that the charm of repose was added? 
On our right was the silent castle, and beyond it the 
silent mountains. . To the left we looked down over 
the clustering houses upon a campagna-valley of 
peaceful cultivation, vineyards, oHve-orchards, grain- 
fields, in their earliest green, and dark stripes of new- 
ploughed earth, over which the cloud-shadows melted 
tracklessly toward the hills which round softly up- 
ward to Monte Cavi. 

When our dinner came, and with it a flask of drowsy 
red Aleatico, like ink with a suspicion of life-blood in 
it, such as one might fancy Shakespeare to have dipped 
his quill in, we had our table so placed that the satis- 
faction of our hunger might be dissensualized by the 
view from the windows. Many a glutton has eaten 
up farms and woodlands- and pastures, and so did we, 
aesthetically, saucing our jrittata and flavoring our 
Aleatico with landscape. It is a fine thing when we 
can accustom our animal appetites to good society, 
when body and soul (like master and servant in an 
Arab tent) sit down together at the same board. This 
thought is forced upon one very often in Italy, as one 
picnics in enchanted spots, where Imagination and 
Fancy play the parts of the unseen waiters in the fairy 
story, and serve us with course after course of their 
ethereal dishes. Sense is satisfied with less and sim- 
pler food when sense and spirit are fed together, and 
the feast of the loaves and fishes is spread for us anew. 
If it be important for a state to educate its lower classes, 
so is it for us personally to instruct, elevate, and refine 
our senses, the lower classes of our private body-politic, 



1 68 FIRESIDE TRAVELS, 

and which, if left to their own brute instincts, will dis- 
order or destroy the whole commonwealth with flam- 
ing insurrection. 

After dinner came our guide to be paid. He, too, 
had had his jrittata and his fiasco (or two), and came 
back absurdly comic, reminding one of the giant who 
was so taken in by the little tailor. He was not in the 
least tipsy; but the wine had excited his poor wits, 
whose destiny it was (awkward servants as they were !) 
to trip up and tumble over each other in proportion 
as they became zealous. He was very anxious to do 
us in some way or other; he only vaguely guessed how, 
but felt so gigantically good-natured that he could not 
keep his face sober long enough. It is quite clear why 
the Italians have no word but recitare to express acting, 
for their stage is no more theatric than their street, and 
to exaggerate in the least would be ridiculous. We 
graver tempered and mannered Septentrions must give 
the pegs a screw or two to bring our spirits up to nat- 
ure's concert-pitch. Storg and I sat enjoying the ex- 
hibition of our giant, as if we had no more concern in 
it than as a comedy. It -was nothing but a spectacle 
to us, at which we were present as critics, while he 
inveighed, expostulated, argued, and besought, in a 
breath. Finding all his attempts miscarry, or result- 
ing in nothing more solid than applause, he said, 
^^Forse non capiscono?" (Perhaps you don't under- 
stand?) "Capiscono pur' troppo,'' (They understand 
only too well,) replied the landlord, upon which terrce 
-filius burst into a laugh, and began begging for more 
huonamano. Failing in this, he tightened his sash, 



ITALY. 169 

offered to kiss our lordships' hands, an act of homage 
which we decHned, and departed, carefully avoiding 
Genezzano on his return, I make no doubt. 

We paid our bill, and went down to the door, where 
we found our guides and donkeys, the host's hand- 
some wife and handsomer daughter, with two of her 
daughters, and a crowd of women and children wait- 
ing to witness the exit of the foreigners. We made all 
the mothers and children happy by a discriminating 
largesse of copper among the little ones. They are a 
charming people, the natives of these out-of-the-way 
Italian towns, if kindness, courtesy, and good looks 
make people charming. Our beards and felt hats, 
which make us pass for artists, were our passporis to 
the warmest welcome and the best cheer everywhere. 
Reluctantly we mounted our donkeys, and trotted 
away, our guides (a man and a boy) running by the 
flank (true henchmen, haunchmen, flanquiers or flun- 
keys) and inspiring the little animals with pokes in the 
side, or with the even more effectual ahrrrrrrr ! Is 
there any radical affinity between this rolling fire of 
r's and the word arra, which means hansel or earnest 
money? The sound is the same, and has a marvel- 
lous spur-power over the donkey, who seems to under- 
stand that full payment of goad or cudgel is to follow. 
I have known it to move even a Sicilian mule, the 
least sensitive and most obstinate of creatures with 
ears, except a British church-warden. 

We wound along under a bleak hill, more desolate 
than anything I had ever seen. The old gray rocks 
seemed not to thrust themselves out of the rusty soil, 



I/O FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

but rather to be stabbed into it, as if they had been 
hailed down upon it by some volcano. There was 
nearly as much look of design as there is in a druidical 
circle, and the whole looked like some graveyard in an 
extinguished world, the monument of mortality itself, 
such as Bishop Wilkins might have found in the moon, 
if he had ever got thither. The path grew ever wilder, 
and Rojate, the next town we came to, grim and 
grizzly, under a grim and grizzly sky of low-trailing 
clouds, which had suddenly gathered, looked drearier 
even than the desolations we had passed. It was easy 
to understand why rocks should like to live here well 
enough; but what could have brought men hither, 
and then kept them here^ was beyond all reasonable 
surmise. Barren hills stood sullenly aloof all around, 
incapable of any crop but lichens. 

We entered the gate, and found ourselves in the 
midst of a group of wild-looking men gathered about 
the door of a wine-shop. Some of them were armed 
with long guns, and we saw (for the first time in situ) 
the tall bandit hat with ribbons wound round it, — such 
as one is familiar with in operas, and on the heads of 
those inhabitants of the Scalimata in Rome, who have 
a costume of their own, and placidly serve as models 
through the whole pictorial range of divine and hu- 
man nature, from the Padre Eterno to Judas. Twenty 
years ago, when my notion of an Italian was divided 
between a monk and a bravo, the first of whom did 
nothing but enter at secret doors and drink your health 
in poison, while the other lived behind corners, support- 
ing himself by the productive industry of digging your 



ITALY. 171 

person all over with a stiletto, I should have looked 
for instant assassination from these carousing 
ruffians. But the only blood shed on the Occasion 
was that of the grape. A ride over the mountains for 
two hours had made us thirsty, and two or three ba- 
jocchi gave a tumbler of vino asciutto to all four of us. 
"You are welcome," said one of the men, "we are 
all artists after a fashion; we are all brothers." The 
manners here are more republican, and the title of 
lordship disappears altogether. Another came up and 
insisted that we should drink a second flask of wine 
as his guests. In vain we protested ; no artist should 
pass through Rojate without accepting that token of 
good-will, and with the liberal help of our guides we 
contrived to gulp it down. He was for another; but 
we protested that we were entirely full, and that it 
was impossible. I dare say the poor fellow would 
have spent a week's earnings on us, if we would have 
allowed it. We proposed to return the civility, and 
to leave a paul for them to drink a good journey to us 
after we were gone; but they would not listen to it. 
Our entertainer followed us along to the Piazza, beg- 
ging one of us to let him serve as donkey-drivet to 
Subiaco. When this was denied, he said that there 
was a jesta here also, and that we must stop long 
enough to see the procession of zitelle (young girls), 
which would soon begin. But evening was already 
gathering, the clouds grew momently darker, and 
fierce, damp gusts, striking us with the suddenness 
of a blow, promised a wild night. We had still eight 
miles of mountain-path before us, and we struggled 



1/2 I' I RESIDE TRAVELS. 

away. As we crossed the next summit beyond the 
town, a sound of chanting drifted by us on the wind, 
wavered hither and thither, now heard, now lost, then 
a doubtful something between song and gust, and, 
lingering a few moments, we saw the white head-dresses, 
gliding two by two, across a gap between the houses. 
The scene and the music were both in neutral tints, a 
sketch, as it were, in sepia a little blurred. 

Before long the clouds almost brushed us as they 
eddied silently by, and then it began to rain, first mist- 
ily, and then in thick, hard drops. Fortunately there 
was a moon, shining placidly in the desert heaven 
above all this turmoil, or we could not have found our 
path, which in a few moments became a roaring tor- 
rent almost knee-deep. It was a cold rain, and far 
above us, where the mountain -peaks tore gaps in the 
clouds, we could see the white silence of new-fallen 
snow. Sometimes we had to dismount and wade, — 
a circumstance which did not make our saddles more 
comfortable when we returned to them and could 
hear them go crosh^ crosh, as the water gurgled out of 
them at every jolt. There was no hope of shelter 
nearer than Subiaco, no sign of man, and no sound 
but the multitudinous roar of waters on every side. 
Rivulet whispered to rivulet, and water-fall shouted 
to water -fall, as they leaped from rock to rock, all 
hurrying to reinforce the main torrent below, which 
hummed onward toward the Anib with dilated heart. 
So gathered the hoarse Northern swarms to descend 
upon sunken Italy; and so forever does physical and 
intellectual force seek its fatal equilibrium, rushing 



ITALY. 173 

in and occupying wherever it is drawn by the attrac- 
tion of a lower level. 

We forded large streams that had been dry beds an. 
hour before; and so sudden was the creation of the 
floods, that it gave one almost as fresh a feeling of 
water as if one had been present in Eden when the 
first rock gave birth to the first fountain. I had a 
severe cold, I was wet through from the hips down- 
ward, and yet I never enjoyed anything more in my 
Hfe, — so different is the shower-bath to which we 
doom ourselves from that whose string is pulled by 
the prison-warden compulsion. After our little bear- 
ers had tottered us up and down the dusky steeps of a 
few more mountain-spurs, where a misstep would 
have sent us spinning down the fathomless black no- 
where below, we came out upon the high-road, and 
found it a fine one, as all the great Italian roads are. 
The rain broke off suddenly, and on the left, seeming 
about half a mile away, sparkled the hghts of Subiaco, 
flashing intermittently hke a knot of fire-flies in a 
meadow. The town, owing to the necessary wind- 
ings of the road, was still three miles off, and just as 
the guides had progued and ahrred the donkeys into 
a brisk joggle, I resolved to give up my saddle to the 
boy, and try Tom Coryate's compasses. It was 
partly out of humanity to myself and partly to him, 
for he was dred and I was cold. The elder guide 
and I took the lead, and, as I looked back, I laughed 
to see the lolling ears of Storg's donkey thrust from 
under his long cloak, as if he were coming out from a 
black Arab tent. We soon left them behind, and 



174 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

paused at a bridge over the Anio till we heard the 
patter of little hoofs again. The bridge is a single 
arch, bent between the steep edges of a gorge through 
which the Anio huddled far below, showing a green 
gleam here and there in the struggling moonlight, as 
if a fish rolled up his burnished flank. After another 
mile and a half, we reached the gate, and awaited our 
companions. It was dreary enough, — waiting al- 
ways is, — and as the snow-chilled wind whistled 
through the damp archway where we stood, my legs 
illustrated feelingly to me how they cool water in the 
East, by wrapping the jars with wet woollen, and set- 
ting them in a draught. At last they came; I re- 
mounted, and we went sliding through the steep, wet 
streets till we had fairly passed through the whole 
town. Before a long building of two stories, without 
a symptom of past or future light, we stopped. "" Ecco 
la PalettaV said the guide, and began to pound furi- 
ously on the door with a large stone, which he some 
time before provided for the purpose. After a long 
period of sullen irresponsiveness, we heard descending 
footsteps, light streamed through the chinks of the 
door, and the invariable "C/^i <?.?" which precedes 
the unbarring of all portals here, came from within. 
^^Due forestieri," answered the guide, and the bars 
ratded in hasty welcome. ''Make us," we exclaimed, 
as we stiffly climbed down from our perches, "your 
biggest fire in your biggest chimney, and then we will 
talk of supper!" In five minutes two great laurel- 
fagots were spitting and crackling in an enormous 
fire-place; and Storgand I were in the costume which 



ITALY. 175 

Don Quixote wore on the Brown Mountain. Of 
course there was nothing for supper but a jrittata; 
but there are worse things in the world than a jrittata 
col prosciutto, and we discussed it like a society just 
emerging from barbarism, the upper half of our per- 
sons presenting all the essentials of an advanced civ- 
ilization, while our legs skulked under the table as 
free from sartorial impertinences as those of the noblest 
savage that ever ran wild in the woods. And so eccoci 
finalmente arrivati ! 

2'jth. — Nothing can be more lovely than the scen- 
ery about Subiaco. The town itself is built on a kind 
of cone rising from the midst of a valley abounding 
in olives and vines, with a superb mountain horizon 
around it, and the green Anio cascading at its feet. As 
you walk to the high-perched convent of San Bene 
detto, you look across the river on your right just after 
leaving the town, to a cliff over which the ivy pours in 
torrents, and in which dwellings have been hollowed 
out. In the black doorway of every one sits a woman 
in scarlet bodice and white head -gear, with a distaff 
spinning, while overhead countless nightingales sing 
at once from the fringe of shrubbery. The glorious 
great white clouds look over the mountain -tops into 
our enchanted valley, and sometimes a lock of their 
vapory wool would be torn off, to lie for a while in 
some inaccessible ravine like a snow-drift; but it 
seemed as if no shadow could fly over our privacy of 
sunshine to-day. The approach to the monastery is 
delicious. You pass out of the hot sun into the green 
shadows of ancient ilexes, leaning and twisting every 



176 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

way that is graceful, their branches velvety with bril- 
Hant moss, in which grow feathery ferns, fringing 
them with a halo of verdure. Then comes the con- 
vent, with its pleasant old monks, who show their 
sacred vessels (one by Cellini) and their relics, among 
which is a finger-bone of one of the Innocents. Lower 
down is a convent of Santa Scolastica, where the first 
book was printed in Italy. 

But though one may have daylight till after twenty- 
four o'clock in Italy, the days are no longer than ours, 
and I must go back to La Paletta to see about a vettura 
to Tivoli. I leave Storg sketching, and walk slowly 
down, lingering over the ever-changeful views, lin- 
gering opposite the nightingale-cliff, but get back to 
Subiaco and the veUurino at last. The growl of a 
thunder-storm soon brought Storg home, and we leave 
Subiaco triumphantly, at five o'clock, in a light car- 
riage, drawn by three gray stallions (harne'ssed 
abreast) on the full gallop. I cannot describe our 
drive, the mountain-towns, with their files of girls 
winding up from the fountain with balanced water- 
jars of ruddy copper, or chattering around it bright- 
hued as parrots, the ruined castles, the green gleams 
of the capricious river, the one great mountain that 
soaked up all the rose of sunset, and, after all else grew 
dim, still glowed as if with inward fires, and, later, the 
white spray smoke of Tivoli that drove down the 
valley under a clear cold moon, contrasting strangely 
with the red glare of the lime-furnace on the opposite 
hillside. It is well that we can be happy sometimes 
without peeping and botanizing in the materials that 



ITALY. 177 

make us so. It is not often that we can escape the 
evil genius of analysis that haunts our modern day- 
light of self- consciousness {wir hahen ja aujgekldrt!) 
and enjoy a day of right Chaucer. 

P.S. Now that I am printing this, a dear friend 
sends me an old letter, and says, ''Slip in somewhere, 
by way of contrast, what you wrote me of your visit 
to Passawampscot." It is odd, almost painful, to be 
confronted with your past self and your past self's 
doings, when you have forgotten both. But here is 
my bit of American scenery, such as it is. 

While we were waiting for the boat, we had time to 
investigate P. a little. We wandered about with no 
one to molest us or make us afraid. No cicerone was 
lying in wait for us, no verger expected with funeral 
solemnity the more than compulsory shilling. I re- 
member the whole population of Cortona gathering 
round me, and beseeching me not to leave their city 
till I had seen the lampadone, whose keeper had un- 
happily gone out to walk, taking the key with him. 
Thank Fortune, here were no antiquities, no galleries 
of Pre-Raphaelite art, every lank figure looking as if 
it had been stretched on a rack, before which the 
Anglo-Saxon writhes because he ought to like them 
and cannot for the soul of him. It is a pretty little 
village, cuddled down among the hills, the clay soil 
of which gives them, to a pilgrim from the parched 
gravelly inland, a look of almost fanatical green. 
The fields are broad, and wholly given up to the graz- 
ing of cattle and sheep, which dotted them thickly 



1/8 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

in the breezy sunshine. The open doors of a barn, 
through which the wind flowed rusthng the loose locks 
of the mow, attracted us. Swallows swam in and out 
with level wings, or crossed each other, twittering in 
the dusky mouth of their hay-scented cavern. Two 
or three hens and a cock (none of your gawky Shang- 
hais, long-legged as a French peasant on his stilts, 
but the true red cock of the ballads, full-chested, coral- 
combed, fountain -tailed) were inquiring for hay -seed 
in the background. What frame in what gallery ever 
enclosed such a picture as is squared within the 
groundsel, side-posts, and lintel of a barn-door, 
whether for eye or fancy ? The shining floor suggests 
the flail-beat of autumn, that pleasantest of monoto- 
nous sounds, and the later husking-bee, where the lads 
and lasses sit round laughingly busy under the swing- 
ing lantern. 

Here we found a fine, stalwart fellow shearing sheep. 
This was something new to us, and we watched him 
for some time with many questions, which he an- 
swered with off-hand good-nature. Going away, I 
thanked him for having taught me something. He 
laughed, and said, "Ef you '11 take off them gloves o' 
yourn, I '11 give ye a try at the practical part on 't." 
He was in the right of it. I never saw anything hand- 
somer than those brown hands of his, on which the 
sinews stood out, as he handled his shears, tight as a 
drawn bow-string. How much more admirable is 
this tawny vigor, the badge of fruitful toil, than the 
crop of early muscle that heads out under the forcing- 
glass of the gymnasium ! Foreigners do not feel easy 



ITALY. 179 

in America, because there are no peasants and under- 
lings here to be humble to them. The truth is, that 
none but those who feel themselves only artificially 
the superiors of our sturdy yeomen see in their self- 
respect any uncomfortable assumption of equality. It 
is the last thing the yeoman is hkely to think of. They 
do not like the "I say, ma good fellah" kind of style, 
and commonly contrive to snub it. They do not value 
condescension at the same rate that he does who 
vouchsafes it to them. If it be a good thing for an 
English duke that he has no social superiors.. I think 
it can hardly be bad for a Yankee farmer. If it be a 
bad thing for the duke that he meets none but infe- 
riors, it cannot harm the farmer much that he never 
has the chance. At any rate, there was no thought 
of incivility in my friend Hobbinol's jibe at my kids, 
only a kind of jolly superiority. But I did not Hke to 
be taken for a city gcnt^ so I told him I was born and 
bred in the country as well as he. He laughed again, 
and said, "Wal, anyhow, I've the advantage of ye, 
for you never see a sheep shore, an' I 've ben to the 
Opery and shore sheep myself into the bargain." He 
told me that there were two hundred sheep in the 
town, and that his father could remember when there 
were four times as many. The sea laps and mumbles 
the soft roots of the hills, and licks away an acre or 
two of good pasturage every season. The father, an 
old man of eighty, stood looking on, pleased with his 
son's wit, and brown as if the Passawampscot fogs 
were walnut-juice. 

We dined at a little tavern, with a gilded ball hung 



l80 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

out for sign, — a waif, I fancy, from some shipwreck. 
The landlady was a brisk, amusing little body, who 
soon informed us that her husband was own cousin to 
a Senator of the United States. A very elaborate 
sampler in the parlor, in which an obelisk was wept 
over by a somewhat costly willow in silver thread, 
recorded the virtues of the Senator's maternal grand- 
father and grandmother. After dinner, as we sat 
smoking our pipes on the piazza, our good hostess 
brought her little daughter, and made her repeat 
verses utterly unintelligible, but conjecturally moral, 
and certainly depressing. Once set agoing, she ran 
down like an alarm-clock. We awaited her subsi- 
dence as that of a shower or other inevitable natural 
phenomenon. More refreshing was the talk of a tall 
returned Californian, who told us, among other things, 
that "he should n't mind Panahmy's bein' sunk, oilers 
providin' there warn't none of our folks onto it when 
it went down !" 

Our landlady's exhibition of her daughter puts me 
in mind of something similar, yet oddly different, 
which happened to Storg and me at Palestrina. We 
happened to praise the beauty of our stout locandiera' s 
little girl. "Ah, she is nothing to her elder sister just 
married," said the mother. "If you could see her! 
She is bella, hclla, bella!" We thought no more of 
it; but after dinner, the good creature, with no warn- 
ing but a tap at the door and a humble con permesso, 
brought her in all her bravery, and showed her off 
to us as simply and naturally as if she had been a 
picture. The girl, who was both beautiful and mod- 



ITALY. l8l 

est, bore it with the dignified aplomh of a statue. She 
knew we admired her, and Hked it, but with the in- 
difference of a rose. There is something very charm- 
ing, I think, in this wholly unsophisticated conscious- 
ness, with no alloy of vanity or coquetry. 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 

Byron hit the white, which he often shot very wide 
of in his ItaHan Guide-Book, when he called Rome 
"my country." But it is a feeling which comes to 
one slowly, and is absorbed into one's system during 
a long residence. Perhaps one does not feel it till he 
has gone away, as things always seem fairer when 
we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible 
tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons. 
However it be. Fancy gets a rude shock at entering 
Rome, which it takes her a great while to get over. 
She has gradually made herself believe that she is ap- 
proaching a city of the dead, and has seen nothing on 
the road from Civita Vecchia to disturb that theory. 
Milestones, with "Via Aurelia" carved upon them, 
have confirmed it. It is eighteen hundred years ago 
with her, and on the dial of time the shadow has not 
yet trembled over the line that marks the beginning of 
the first century. She arrives at the gate, and a dirty, 
blue man, with a cocked hat and a white sword-belt, 
asks for her passport. Then another man, as like 
the first as one spoon is like its fellow, and having, 
like him, the look of being run in a mould, tells her 
that she must go to the custom-house. It is as if a 
ghost, who had scarcely recovered from the jar of 
hearing Charon say, "I'll trouble you for your 
182 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 1 83 

obolus, if you please," should have his portmanteau 
seized by the Stygian tide-waiters to be searched. Is 
there anything, then, contraband of death? asks poor 
Fancy of herself. 

But it is the misfortune (or the safeguard) of the 
English mind that Fancy is always an outlaw, liable 
to be laid by the heels wherever Constable Common 
Sense can catch her. She submits quietly as the 
postilion cries, "Yee-ipf" and cracks his whip, and 
the rattle over the pavement begins, struggles a mo- 
ment when the pillars of the colonnade stalk ghostly 
by in the moonlight, and finally gives up all for lost 
when she sees Bernini's angels polking on their pedes- 
tals along the sides of the Ponte Sant' Angelo with the 
emblems of the Passion in their arms. 

You are in Rome, of course ; the sbirro said so, the 
doganiere bowed it, and the postilion swore it; but it 
is a Rome of modern houses, muddy streets, dingy 
cajjes, cigar-smokers, and French soldiers, the mani- 
fest junior of Florence. And yet full of anachronisms, 
for in a little while you pass the column of Antoninus, 
find the Dogana in an ancient temple whose furrowed 
pillars show through the recent plaster, and feel as 
if you saw the statue of Minerva in a Paris bonnet. 
You are driven to a hotel where all the barbarian 
languages are spoken in one wild conglomerate by the 
Commissionnaire, have your dinner wholly in French, 
and wake the next morning dreaming of the Tenth 
Legion, to see a regiment of Chasseurs de Vincennes 
trotting by. 

For a few days one undergoes a tremendous recoil. 



1 84 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

Other places have a distinct meaning. London is 
the visible throne of King Slock; Versailles is the 
apotheosis of one of Louis XIV. 's cast periwigs; 
Florence and Pisa are cities of the Middle Ages ; but 
Rome seems to be a parody upon itself. The ticket 
that admits you to see the starting of the horses at 
carnival has S. P. Q. R. at the top of it, and you give 
the custode a paul for showing you the wolf that suckled 
Romulus and Remus. The Senatus seems to be a 
score or so of elderly gentlemen in scarlet, and the 
Populusque Romanus a swarm of nasty friars. 

But there is something more than mere earth in the 
spot where great deeds have been done. The sur- 
veyor cannot give the true dimensions of Marathon 
or Lexington, for they are not reducible to square 
acres. Dead glory and greatness leave ghosts behind 
them, and departed empire has a metempsychosis, if 
nothing else has. Its spirit haunts the grave, and 
waits and waits, till at last it finds a body to its mind, 
slips into it, and historians moralize on the fluctuation 
of human affairs. By and by, perhaps, enough ob- 
servations will have been recorded to assure us that 
these recurrences are firmamental, and historionomers 
will have measured accurately the sidereal years of 
races. When that is once done, events will move 
with the quiet of an orrery, and nations will consent 
to their peridynamis and apodynamis with planetary 
composure. 

Be this as it may, you become gradually aware of 
the presence of this imperial ghost among the Roman 
ruins. You receive hints and startles of it through 



A FEJV BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 1 85 

the senses first, as the horse always shies at the appari- 
tion before the rider can see it. Then, Httle by Kttle, 
you become assured of it, and seem to hear the brush 
of its mantle through some hall of Caracalla's baths, 
or one of those other solitudes of Rome. And those 
solitudes are without a parallel ; for it is not the mere 
absence of man, but the sense of his departure, that 
makes a profound loneliness. Musing upon them, 
you cannot but feel the shadow of that disembodied 
empire, and, remembering how the foundations of the 
Capitol wTre laid where a head was turned up, you 
are impelled to prophesy that the Idea of Rome will 
incarnate itself again as soon as an Italian brain is 
found large enough to hold it, and to give unity to 
those discordant members. 

But, though I intend to observe no regular pattern 
in my Roman mosaic, which will resemble more what 
one finds in his pockets after a walk, — a pagan cube 
or two from the palaces of the Caesars, a few Byzan- 
tine bits, given with many shrugs of secrecy by a lay 
brother at San Paolo jiiori le mura, and a few more 
(quite as ancient) from the manufactory at the Vati- 
can, — it seems natural to begin what one has to say 
of Rome with something about St. Peter's; for the 
saint sits at the gate here as well as in Paradise. 

It is very common for people to say that they are 
disappointed in the first sight of St. Peter's ; and one 
hears much the same about Niagara. I cannot help 
thinking that the fault is in themselves ; and that if the 
church and the cataract were in the habit of giving 
away their thoughts with that rash generosity which 



1 86 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

characterizes tourists, they might perhaps say of their 
visitors, "Well, if you are those men of whom we have 
heard so much, we are a little disappointed, to tell the 
truth!" The refined tourist expects somewhat too 
much when he takes it for granted that St. Peter's will 
at once decorate him with the order of imagination, 
just as Victoria knights an alderman when he presents 
an address. Or perhaps he has been getting up a little 
architecture on the road from Florence, and is dis- 
comfited because he does not know whether he ought 
to be pleased or not, which is very much as if he should 
wait to be told whether it was fresh water or salt which 
makes the exhaustless grace of Niagara's emerald 
curve, before he benignly consented to approve. It 
would be wiser, perhaps, for him to consider whether, 
if Michael Angelo had had the building of him^ his 
own personal style would not have been more im- 
pressive. 

It is not to be doubted that minds are of as many 
different orders as cathedrals, and that the Gothic 
imagination is vexed and discommoded in the vain 
endeavor to flatten its pinnacles, and fit itself into the 
round Roman arches. But if it be impossible for a 
man to like everything, it is quite possible for him to 
avoid being driven mad by what does not please him; 
nay, it is the imperative duty of a wise man to find 
out what that secret is which makes a thing pleasing 
to another. In approaching St. Peter's, one must 
take his Protestant shoes off his feet, and leave them 
behind him, in the Piazza Rusticucci. Otherwise the 
great Basilica, with those outstretching colonnades 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 1 8/ 

of Bramante, will seem to be a bloated spider lying 
in wait for him, the poor Reformed fly. As he lifts 
the heavy leathern flapper over the door, and is dis- 
charged into the interior by its impetuous recoil, let 
him disburden his mind altogether of stone and mor- 
tar, and think only that he is standing before the 
throne of a dynasty which, even in its decay, is the 
most powerful the world ever saw. Mason-work is 
all very well in itself, but it has nothing to do with the 
aflfair at present in hand. 

Suppose that a man in pouring down a glass of 
claret could drink the South of France, that he could 
so disintegrate the wine by the force of imagination 
as to taste in it all the clustered beauty and bloom of 
the grape, all the dance and song and sunburnt jollity 
of the vintage. Or suppose that in eating bread he 
could transubstantiate it with the tender blade of 
spring, the gleam-flitted corn-ocean of summer, the 
royal autumn, with its golden beard, and the merry 
funerals of harvest. This is what the great poets do 
for us, we cannot tell how, with their fatally-chosen 
words, crowding the happy veins of language again 
with all the life and meaning and music that had been 
dribbling away from them since Adam. And this is 
what the Roman Church does for religion, feeding 
the soul not with the essential religious sentiment, not 
with a drop or two of the tincture of worship, but 
making us feel one by one all those original elements 
of which worship is composed ; not bringing the end 
to us, but making us pass over and feel beneath our 
feet all the golden rounds of the ladder by which the 



1 88 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

climbing generations have reached that end; not 
handing us dryly a dead and extinguished Q.E.D., 
but letting it rather declare itself by the glory with 
which it interfuses the incense-clouds of wonder and 
aspiration and beauty in which it is veiled. The 
secret of her power is typified in the mystery of the 
Real Presence. She is the only church that has been 
loyal to the heart and soul of man, that has clung to 
her faith in the imagination, and that would not give 
over her symbols and images and sacred vessels to the 
perilous keeping of the iconoclast Understanding. 
She has never lost sight of the truth, that the product 
human nature is composed of the sum of flesh and 
spirit, and has accordingly regarded both this world 
and the next as the constituents of that other world 
which we possess by faith. She knows that poor 
Panza, the body, has his kitchen longings and visions, 
as well as Quixote, the soul, his ethereal, and has wit 
enough to supply him with the visible, tangible raw 
material of imagination. She is the only poet among 
the churches, and, while Protestantism is unrolling a 
pocket surveyor' s-plan, takes her votary to the pin- 
nacle of her temple, and shows him meadow, upland, 
and tillage, cloudy heaps of forest clasped with the 
river's jewelled arm, hillsides white with the perpetual 
snow of flocks, and, beyond all, the interminable 
heave of the unknown ocean. Her empire may be 
traced upon the map by the boundaries of races; the 
understanding is her great foe ; and it is the people 
whose vocabulary was incomplete till they had in- 
vented the arch-word Humbug that defies her. With 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 1 89 

that leaden bullet John Bull can bring down Senti- 
ment when she flies her highest. And the more the 
pity for John Bull. One of these days some one 
whose eyes are sharp enough will read in the Times a 
standing advertisement, — ''Lost, strayed, or stolen 
from the farm-yard of the subscriber the valuable 
horse Pegasus. Probably has on him part of a new 
plough-harness, as that is also missing. A suitable 
reward, etc. J. Bull." 

Protestantism reverses the poetical process I have 
spoken of above, and gives not even the bread of life, 
but instead of it the alcohol, or distilled intellectual 
result. This was very well so long as Protestantism 
continued to protest; for enthusiasm sublimates the 
understanding into imagination. But now that she 
also has become an establishment, she begins to per- 
ceive that she made a blunder in trusting herself to 
the intellect alone. She is beginning to feel her way 
back again, as one notices in Puseyism, and other 
such hints. One is put upon reflection when he sees 
burly Englishmen, who dine on beef and porter every 
day, marching proudly through Saint Peter's on Palm 
Sunday, with those frightfully artificial palm-branches 
in their hands. Romanism wisely provides for the 
childish in men. 

Therefore I say again, that one must lay aside his 
Protestantism in order to have a true feehng of Saint 
Peter's. Here in Rome is the laboratory of that mys- 
terious enchantress, who has known so well how to 
adapt herself to all the wants, or, if you will, the weak- 
nesses of human nature, making the retirement of the 



I go FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

convent-cell a merit to the solitary, the scourge or the 
fast a piety to the ascetic, the enjoyment of pomp and 
music and incense a religious act in the sensual, and 
furnishing for the very soul itself a confidante in that 
ear of the dumb confessional, where it may securely 
disburden itself of its sins and sorrows. And the 
dome of St. Peter's is the magic circle within which 
she works her most potent incantations. I confess 
that I could not enter it alone without a kind of awe. 

But, setting entirely aside the effect of this church 
upon the imagination, it is wonderful, if one con- 
sider it only materially. Michael Angelo created a 
new world in which everything was colossal, and it 
might seem that he built this as a fit temple for those 
gigantic figures with which he peopled it to worship in. 
Here his Moses should be high -priest, the service 
should be chanted by his prophets and sibyls, and 
those great pagans should be brought hither from 
San Lorenzo in Florence, to receive baptism. 

However unsatisfactory in other matters, statistics 
are of service here. I have seen' a refined tourist who 
entered, Murray in hand, sternly resolved to have 
St. Peter's look small, brought to terms at once by 
being told that the canopy over the high altar (looking 
very like a four-post bedstead) was ninety-eight feet 
high. If he still obstinates himself, he is finished by 
being made to measure one of the marble putti, which 
look like rather stoutish babies, and are found to be 
six feet, every sculptor's son of them. This ceremony 
is the more interesting, as it enables him to satisfy the 
guide of his proficiency in the Italian tongue by calling 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 191 

them putty at every convenient opportunity. Other- 
wise both he and his assistant terrify each other into 
mutual unintelHgibiHty with that lingua franca of the 
Enghsh-speaking traveller, which is supposed to bear 
some remote affinity to the French language, of which 
both parties are as ignorant as an American Am- 
bassador. 

Murray gives all these little statistical nudges to the 
Anglo-Saxon imagination ; but he knows that its finest 
nerves are in the pocket, and accordingly ends by 
telling you how much the church cost. I forget how 
much it is; but it cannot be more, I fancy, than the 
English national debt multiplied into itself three hun- 
dred and sixty-five times. If the pilgrim, honestly 
anxious for a sensation, will work out this little sum, 
he will be sure to receive all that enlargement of the 
imaginative faculty which arithmetic can give him. 
Perhaps the most dilating fact, after all, is that this 
architectural world has also a separate atmosphere, 
distinct from that of Rome by some ten degrees, and 
unvarying through the year, 

I think that, on the whole, Jonathan gets ready to 
be pleased with St. Peter's sooner than Bull. Ac- 
customed to our lath and plaster expedients for 
churches, the portable sentry-boxes of Zion, mere 
solidity and permanence are pleasurable in them- 
selves; and if he get grandeur also, he has Gospel 
measure. Besides, it is easy for Jonathan to travel. 
He is one drop of a fluid mass, who knows where his 
home is to-day, but can make no guess of where it 
may be to-morrow. Even in a form of government 



192 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

he only takes lodgings for the night, and is ready to 
pay his bill and be off in the morning. He should take 
his motto from Bishop Golias's ''Mihi est propositum 
in tabernd mori,'' though not in the sufistic sense of 
that misunderstood Churchman. But Bull can sel- 
dom be said to travel at all, since the first step of a 
true traveller is out of himself. He plays cricket and 
hunts foxes on the Campagna, makes entries in his 
betting-book while the Pope is giving his benediction, 
and points out Lord Calico to you awfully during the 
Sistine Miserere. If he let his beard grow, it always 
has a startled air, as if it suddenly remembered its 
treason to Sheffield and only makes him look more 
English than ever. A masquerade is impossible to 
him, and his fancy balls are the solemnest facts in the 
world. Accordingly, he enters St. Peter's with the 
dome of St. Paul's drawn tight over his eyes, like a 
criminal's cap, and ready for instant execution rather 
than confess that the English Wren had not a stronger 
wing than the Itahan Angel. I like this in Bull, and 
it renders him the pleasantest of travelling com- 
panions; for he makes you take England along with 
you, and thus you have two countries at once. And 
one must not forget in an Italian inn that it is to Bull 
he owes the clean napkins and sheets, and the privi- 
lege of his morning bath. Nor should Bull himself 
fail to remember that he ate with his fingers till the 
Italian gave him a fork. 

Browning has given the best picture of St. Peter's 
on a festival day, sketching it with a few verses in his 
large style. And doubtless it is the scene of the 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 1 93 

grandest spectacles which the world can see in these 
latter days. Those Easter pomps, where the antique 
world marches visibly before you in gilded mail and 
crimson doublet, refresh the eyes, and are good so 
long as they continue to be merely spectacle. But 
if one think for a moment of the servant of the ser- 
vants of the Lord in cloth of gold, borne on men's 
shoulders, or of the children receiving the blessing of 
their Holy Father, with a regiment of French soldiers 
to protect the father from the children, it becomes a 
little sad. If one would feel the full meaning of those 
ceremonials, however, let him consider the coinci- 
dences between the Romish and the Buddhist forms 
of worship, and remembering that the Pope is the 
direct heir, through the Pontifex IMaximus, of rites 
that were ancient when the Etruscans were modern, he 
will look with a feeling deeper than curiosity upon 
forms which record the earliest conquests of the In- 
visible, the first triumphs of mind over muscle. 

To me the noon silence and solitude of St. Peter's 
were most impressive, when the sunlight, made visible 
by the mist of the ever-burning lamps in which it was 
entangled, hovered under the dome like the holy dove 
goldenly descending. Very grand also is the twilight, 
when all outlines melt into mysterious vastness, and 
the arches expand and lose themselves in the deepen- 
ing shadow. Then, standing in the desert transept, 
you hear the far-off vespers swell and die like low 
breathings of the sea on some conjectured shore. 

As the sky is supposed to scatter its golden star- 
pollen once every year in meteoric showers, so the 



194 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

dome of St. Peter's has its annual efflorescence of fire. 
This illumination is the great show of Papal Rome. 
Just after sunset, I stood upon the Trinita dei Monti 
and saw the little drops of pale light creeping down- 
ward from the cross and trickling over the dome. 
Then, as the sky darkened behind, it seemed as if the 
setting sun had lodged upon the horizon and there 
burned out, the fire still clinging to his massy ribs. 
And when the change from the silver to the golden 
illumination came, it was as if the breeze had fanned 
the embers into flame again. 

Bitten with the Anglo-Saxon gadfly that drives us 
all to disenchant artifice, and see the springs that fix 
it on, I walked down to get a nearer look. My next 
ghmpse was from the bridge of Sant' Angelo; but 
there was no time nor space for pause. Foot-pas- 
sengers crowding hither and thither, as they heard 
the shout of Avantil from the mile of coachmen 
behind, dragoon -horses curtsying backward just 
where there were most women and children to be 
flattened, and the dome drawing all eyes and thoughts 
the wrong way, made a hubbub to be got out of at any 
desperate hazard. Besides, one could not help feeling 
nervously hurried ; for it seemed quite plain to every- 
body that this starry apparition must be as momentary 
as it was wonderful, and that we should find it van- 
ished when we reached the piazza. But suddenly 
you stand in front of it, and see the soft travertine of 
the front suffused with a tremulous, glooming glow, a 
mildened glory, as if the building breathed, and so 
transmuted its shadow into soft pulses of light. 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 1 95 

After wondering long enough, I went back to the 
Pincio, and watched it for an hour longer. But I did 
not wish to see it go out. It seemed better to go home 
and leave it still trembling, so that I could fancy a 
kind of permanence in it, and half believe I should 
find it there again some lucky evening. Before 
leaving it altogether, I went away to cool my eyes with 
darkness, and came back several times; and every 
time it was a new miracle, the more so that it was a 
human piece of faery-work. Beautiful as fire is in 
itself, I suspect that part of the pleasure is meta- 
physical, and that the sense of playing with an ele- 
ment which can be so terrible adds to the zest of the 
spectacle. And then fire is not the least degraded by 
it, because it is not utilized. If beauty were in use, 
the factory would add a grace to the river, and we 
should turn from the fire-writing on the wall of 
heaven to look at a message printed by the magnetic 
telegraph. There may be a beauty in the use itself; 
but utilization is always downward, and it is this feel- 
ing that makes Schiller's Pegasus in yoke so univer- 
sally pleasing. So long as the curse of work clings to 
man, he will see beauty only in play. The capital of 
the most frugal commonwealth in the world burns 
up five thousand dollars a year in gunpowder, and 
nobody murmurs. Provident Judas wished to utilize 
the ointment, but the Teacher would rather that it 
should be wasted in poem. 

The best lesson in aesthetics I ever got (and, like 
most good lessons, it fell from the lips of no regular 
professor) was from an Irishman on the day the 



196 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

Nymph Cochituate was formally introduced to the 
people of Boston. I made one with other rustics in 
the streets, admiring the dignitaries in coaches with 
as much Christian charity as is consistent with an 
elbow in the pit of your stomach and a heel on that 
toe which is your only inheritance from two excellent 
grandfathers. Among other allegorical phenomena, 
there came along what I should have called a hay-cart, 
if I had not known it was a triumphal car, filled with 
that fairest variety of mortal grass which with us is 
apt to spindle so soon into a somewhat sapless woman- 
hood. Thirty-odd young maidens in white gowns, 
with blue sashes and pink wreaths of French crape, 
represented the United States. (How shall we limit our 
number, by the way, if ever Utah be admitted ?) The 
ship, the printing-press, even the wondrous train of 
express-wagons, and other solid bits of civic fantasy, 
had left my Hibernian neighbor unmoved. But this 
brought him down. Turning to me, as the most ap- 
preciative public for the moment, with face of as much 
delight as if his head had been broken, he cried, 
"Now this is raly beautiful! Tothally regyardless 
uv expinse!" Methought my shirt-sleeved lecturer 
on the Beautiful had hit at least one nail full on the 
head. Voltaire but epigrammatized the same thought 
when he said, Lc superflu, chose tres-necessaire. 

As for the ceremonies of the Church, one need not 
waste time in seeing many of them. There is a dreary 
sameness in them, and one can take an hour here 
and an hour there, as it pleases him, just as sure of 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 1 97 

finding the same pattern as he would be in the first 
or last yard of a roll of printed cotton. For myself, I 
do not like to go and look with mere curiosity at what 
is sacred and solemn to others. To how many these 
Roman shows are sacred, I cannot guess; but cer- 
tainly the Romans do not value them much. I 
walked out to the grotto of Egeria on Easter Sunday* 
that I might not be tempted down to St. Peter's to 
see the mockery of Pio Nono's benediction. Jt is 
certainly Christian, for he blesses them that curse him, 
and does all the good which the waving of his fingers 
can do to people who would use him despitefully if 
they had the chance. I told an Italian servant she 
might have the day; but she said she did not care 
for it. 

"But," urged I, "will you not go to receive the 
blessing of the Holy Father?" 

"No, sir." 

"Do you not wish it?" 

"Not in the least: his blessing would do me no 
good. If I get the blessing of Heaven, it will serve 
my turn." 

There were three families of foreigners in our house, 
and I believe none of the Italian servants went to St. 
Peter's that day. Yet they commonly speak kindly 
of Pius. I have heard the same phrase from several 
Italians of the working-class. "He is a good man," 
they said, "but ill-led." 

What one sees in the streets of Rome is worth more 
than what one sees in the churches. The churches 
themselves are generally ugly. St. Peter's has 



198 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

crushed all the life out of architectural genius, and 
all the modern churches look as if they were swelling 
themselves in imitation of the great Basilica. There 
is a clumsy magnificence about them, and their 
heaviness oppresses you. Their marble incrusta- 
tions look like a kind of architectural elephantiasis, 
and the parts are puffy with a dropsical want of pro- 
portion. There is none of the spring and soar which 
one#may see even in the Lombard churches, and a 
Roman column standing near one of them, slim and 
gentleman-like, satirizes silently their tawdry parvenu- 
ism. Attempts at mere bigness are ridiculous in a 
city where the Colosseum still yawns in crater-hke 
ruin, and where Michael Angelo made a noble church 
out of a single room in Diocletian's baths. 

Shall I confess it? Michael Angelo seems to me, 
in his angry reaction against sentimental beauty, to 
have mistaken bulk and brawn for the antithesis of 
feebleness. He is the apostle of the exaggerated, the 
Victor Hugo of painting and sculpture. I have a 
feeling that rivalry was a more powerful motive with 
him than love of art, that he had the conscious inten- 
tion to be original, which seldom leads to anything 
better than being extravagant. The show of muscle 
proves strength, not power; and force for mere force's 
sake in art makes one think of Milo caught in his own 
log. This is my second thought, and strikes me as 
perhaps somewhat niggardly toward one in whom 
you cannot help feeling there was so vast a possibility. 
And then his Eve, his David, his Sibyls, his Prophets, 
his Sonnets ! Well, I take it all back, and come round 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN- MOSAIC. 1 99 

to St. Peter's again just to hint that I doubt about 
domes. In Rome they are so much the fashion that 
I felt as if they were the goitre of architecture. Gen- 
erally they look heavy. Those on St. Mark's in Ven- 
ice are the only light ones I ever saw, and they look 
almost airy, like tents puffed out with wind. I sup- 
pose one must be satisfied with the interior effect, 
which is certainly noble in St. Peter's. But for im- 
pressiveness both within and without there is nothing 
like a Gothic cathedral for me, nothing that crowns 
a city so nobly, or makes such an island of twilight 
silence in the midst of its noonday clamors. 

Now as to what one sees in the streets, the beggars 
are certainly the first things that draw the eye. Beg- 
gary is an institution here. The Church has sancti- 
fied it by the establishment of mendicant orders, and 
indeed it is the natural result of a social system where 
the non-producing class makes not only the laws, but 
the ideas. The beggars of Rome go far toward prov- 
ing the diversity of origin in mankind, for on them 
surely the curse of Adam never fell. It is easier to 
fancy that Adam Vaiirien, the first tenant of the Fool's 
Paradise, after sucking his thumbs for a thousand 
years, took to wife Eve Faniente, and became the 
progenitor of this race, to whom also he left a calendar 
in which three hundred and sixty-five days in the year 
were made feasts, sacred from all secular labor. 
Accordingly, they not merely do nothing, but they do 
it assiduously and almost with religious fervor. I 
have seen ancient members of this sect as constant at 
their accustomed street-corner as the bit of broken 



200 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

column on which they sat ; and when a man does this 
in rainy weather, as rainy weather is in Rome, he has 
the spirit of a fanatic and martyr. 

It is not that the Itahans are a lazy people. On the 
contrary, I am satisfied that they are industrious so 
far as they are allowed to be. But, as I said before, 
when a Roman does nothing, he does it in the high 
Roman fashion. A friend of mine was having on ^ 
of his rooms arranged for a private theatre, and sent 
for a person who was said to be an expert in the busi- 
ness to do it for him. After a day's trial, he was sat- 
isfied that his lieutenant was rather a hindrance tha:i 
a help, and resolved to dismiss him. 

"What is your charge for your day's services?" 

"Two scudi, sir." 

"Two scudi! Five pauls would be too much. 
You have done nothing but stand with your hands 
in your pockets and get in the way of other people." 

"Lordship is perfectly right; but that is my way of 
working." 

It is impossible for a stranger to say who may not 
beg in Rome. It seems to be a sudden madness that 
may seize any one at the sight of a foreigner. You 
see a very respectable looking person in the street, 
and it is odds but, as you pass him, his hat comes off, 
his whole figure suddenly dilapidates itself, assuming 
a tremble of professional weakness, and you hear the 
everlasting qualche cosa per carita? You are in 
doubt whether to drop a bajoccho into the next car- 
dinal's hat which offers you its sacred cavity in answer 
to your salute. You begin to believe that the hat was 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 201 

invented for the sole purpose of ingulfing coppers, and 
that its highest type is the great Triregno itself, into 
which the pence of Peter rattle. 

But you soon learn to distinguish the established 
beggars, and to the three professions elsewhere con- 
sidered liberal you add a fourth for this latitude, — 
mendicancy. Its professors look upon themselves as 
a kind of guild which ought to be protected by the 
government. I fell into talk with a woman who 
begged of me in the Colosseum. Among other things 
she complained that the government did not at all 
consider the poor. 

"Where is the government that does?" I said. 

"Eh giaf Excellency; but this government lets 
beggars from the country come into Rome, which is 
a great injury to the trade of us born Romans. There 
is Beppo, for example ; he is a man of property in his 
own town, and has a dinner of three courses every 
day. He has portioned two daughters with three 
thousand scudi each, and left Rome during the time 
of the Republic wdth the rest of the nobility." 

At first, one is shocked and pained at the exhibition 
of deformities in the street. But by and by he comes 
to look upon them with little more emotion than is 
excited by seeing the tools of any other trade. The 
melancholy of the beggars is purely a matter of busi- 
ness; and they look upon their maims as Fortunatus 
purses, which will always give them money. A 
withered arm they present to you as a highwayman 
would his pistol; a goitre is a Hfe-annuity; a St. 
Vitus dance is as good as an engagement as prima 



202 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

ballerina at the Apollo; and to have no legs at all is 
to stand on the best footing with fortune. They are 
a merry race, on the whole, and quick-witted, like the 
rest of their countrymen. I believe the regular fee 
for a beggar is a quattrino, about a quarter of a cent; 
but they expect more of foreigners. A friend of mine 
once gave one of these tiny coins to an old woman; 
she delicately expressed her resentment by exclaim- 
ing, "Thanks, signoria. God will reward even you !" 

A begging friar came to me one day with a sub- 
scription for repairing his convent. "Ah, but I am 
a heretic," said I. "Undoubtedly," with a shrug, 
implying a respectful acknowledgment of a foreigner's 
right to choose warm and dry lodgings in the other 
world as well as in this, "but your money is perfectly 
orthodox." 

Another favorite way of doing nothing is to exca- 
vate the Forum. I think the Fanientes like this all 
the better, because it seems a kind of satire upon work, 
as the witches parody the Christian offices of devotion 
at their Sabbath. A score or so of old men in volu- 
minous cloaks shift the earth from one side of a large 
pit to the other, in a manner so leisurely that it is posi- 
tive repose to look at them. The most bigoted anti- 
Fourierist might acknowledge this to be attractive 
industry. 

One conscript father trails a small barrow up to 
another, who stands leaning on a long spade. Ar- 
riving, he fumbles for his snuff-box, and offers it de- 
liberately to his friend. Each takes an ample pinch, 
and both seat themselves to await the result. If one 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 203 

should sneeze, he receives the Felicital of the other; 
and, after allowing the titillation to subside, he re- 
plies, Grazia ! Then follows a little conversation, and 
then they prepare to load. But it occurs to the 
barrow-driver that this is a good opportunity to fill 
and light his pipe ; and to do so conveniently he needs 
his barrow to sit upon. He draws a few whiffs, and 
a little more conversation takes place. The barrow 
is now ready; but first the wielder of the spade will 
fill his pipe also. This done, more whiffs and more 
conversation. Then a spoonful of earth is thrown 
into the barrow, and it starts on its return. But 
midway it meets an empty barrow, and both stop to 
go through the snuff-box ceremonial once more, and 
to discuss whatever new thing has occurred in the 
excavation since their last encounter. And so it goes 
on all day. 

As I see more of material antiquity, I begin to 
suspect that my interest in it is mostly factitious. The 
relations of races to the physical world (only to be 
studied fruitfully on the spot) do not excite in me an 
interest at all proportionate to that I feel in their in- 
fluence on the moral advance of mankind, which one 
may as easily trace in his own library as on the spot. 
The only useful remark I remember to have made 
here is, that, the situation of Rome being far less 
strong than that of any city of the Etruscan league, it 
must have been built where it is for purposes of com- 
merce. It is the most defensible point near the mouth 
of the Tiber. It is only as rival trades-folk that Rome 



204 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

and Carthage had any comprehensible cause of quar- 
rel. It is only as a commercial people that we can 
understand the early tendency of the Romans towards 
democracy. As for antiquity, after reading history, 
one is haunted by a discomforting suspicion that the 
names so painfully deciphered in hieroglyphic or 
arrow-head inscriptions are only so many more 
Smiths and Browns masking it in unknown tongues. 
Moreover, if we Yankees are twitted with not know- 
ing the difference between big and great, may not 
those of us who have learned it turn round on many 
a monument over here with the same reproach? I 
confess I am beginning to sympathize with a country- 
man of ours from Michigan, v/ho asked our Minister 
to direct him to a specimen ruin and a specimen gallery, 
that he might see and be rid of them once for all. I 
saw three young Englishmen going through the Vati- 
can by catalogue and number, the other day, in a 
fashion which John Bull is apt to consider exclusively 
American. "Number 300!" says the one with cata- 
logue and pencil, "have you seen it?" "Yes," 
answer his two comrades, and, checking it off, he 
goes on with Number 301. Having witnessed the 
unavailing agonies of many Anglo-Saxons from both 
sides of the Atlantic in their effort to have the correct 
sensation before many hideous examples of antique 
bad taste, my heart warmed toward my business-like 
British cousins, who were doing their aesthetics in this 
thrifty auctioneer fashion. Our cart-before-horse 
education, which makes us more famihar with the 
history and literature of Greeks and Romans than with 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 20 5 

those of our own ancestry, (though there is nothing in 
ancient art to match Shakespeare or a Gothic min- 
ster,) makes us the gulls of what we call classical 
antiquity. In sculpture, to be sure, they have us on 
the hip. Europe were worth visiting, if only to be 
rid of this one old man of the sea. 

I am not ashamed to confess a singular sympathy 
with what are known as the Middle Ages. I cannot 
help thinking that few periods have left behind them 
such traces of inventiveness and power. Nothing 
is more tiresome than the sameness of modern cities; 
and it has often struck me that this must also have 
been true of those ancient ones in which Greek archi- 
tecture or its derivatives prevailed, — true at least 
as respects public buildings. But mediaeval towns, 
especially in Italy, even when only fifty miles asunder, 
have an individuality of character as marked as that 
of trees. Nor is it merely this originality that attracts 
me, but likewise the sense that, however old, they are 
nearer to me in being modern and Christian. I find 
it harder to bridge over the gulf of Paganism than of 
centuries. Apart from any difference in the men, I 
had a far deeper emotion when I stood on the Sasso 
di Dante, than at Horace's Sabine farm or by the tomb 
of Virgil. The latter, indeed, interested me chiefly 
by its association with comparatively modern legend; 
and one of the buildings I am most glad to have seen 
in Rome is the Bear Inn, where Montaigne lodged on 
his arrival. 

I think it must have been for some such reason that 
I liked my Florentine better than my Roman walks, 



206 . FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

though I am vastly more contented with merely being 
in Rome. Florence is more noisy; indeed, I think 
it the noisiest town I was ever in. What with the 
continual jangling of its bells, the rattle of Austrian 
drums, and the street-cries, Ancora mi raccapriccia. 
The Italians are a vociferous people, and most so 
among the Florentines. Walking through a back 
street one day, I saw an old woman higgling with a 
peripatetic dealer, who, at every interval afforded him 
by the remarks of his veteran antagonist, would tip 
his head on one side, and shout, with a kind of won- 
dering enthusiasm, as if he could hardly trust the 
evidence of his own senses to such loveliness, O, che 
hellezza! che helle-e-ezza ! The two had been con- 
tending as obstinately as the Greeks and Trojans 
over the body of Patroclus, and I was curious to know 
what was the object of so much desire on the one side 
and admiration on the other. It was a half-dozen 
of weazeny baked pears, beggarly remnant of the 
day's traffic. Another time I stopped before a stall, 
debating whether to buy some fine-looking peaches. 
Before I had made up my mind, the vender, a stout 
fellow, with a voice like a prize-bull of Bashan, opened 
a mouth round and large as the muzzle of a blunder- 
buss, and let fly into my ear the following pertinent 
observation: ^^ Belle pesche! belle pe-e-esche!^' (cres- 
cendo). I stared at him in stunned bewilderment; 
but, seeing that he had reloaded and was about to fire 
again, took to my heels, the exploded syllables rattling 
after me like so many buckshot. A single turnip is 
argument enough with them till midnight; nay, I 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 20/ 

have heard a ruffian yelhng over a covered basket, 
which, I am convinced, was empty, and only carried 
as an excuse for his stupendous vocahsm. It never 
struck me before what a quiet people Americans are. 
Of the pleasant places within easy walk of Rome, I 
prefer the garden of the Villa Albani as being most 
Italian. One does not go to Italy for examples of 
Price on the Picturesque. Compared with land- 
scape-gardening, it is Racine to Shakespeare, I grant; 
but it has its own charm, nevertheless. I like the 
balustraded terraces, the sun-proof laurel walks, the 
vases and statues. It is only in such a climate that it 
does not seem inhuman to thrust a naked statue out 
of doors. Not to speak of their incongruity, how 
dreary do those white figures look at Fountains Abbey 
in that shrewd Yorkshire atmosphere ! To put them 
there shows the same bad taste that led Prince Polonia, 
as Thackeray calls him, to build an artificial ruin 
within a mile of Rome. But I doubt if the Italian 
garden will bear transplantation. Farther north, or 
under a less constant sunshine, it is but half-hardy at 
the best. Within the city, the garden of the French 
Academy is my favorite retreat, because little fre- 
quented ; and there is an arbor there in which I have 
read comfortably (sitting where the sun could reach 
me) in January. By the way, there is something very 
agreeable in the way these people have of making a 
kind of fireside of the sunshine. With us it is either 
too hot or too cool, or we are too busy. But, on the 
other hand, they have no such thing as a chimney- 
corner. 



2C8 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 

Of course I haunt the collections of art faithfully; 
but my favorite gallery, after all, is the street. There 
I always find something entertaining, at least. The 
other day, on my way to the Colonna Palace, I passed 
the Fountain of Trevi, from which the water is now 
shut off on account of repairs to the aqueduct. A 
scanty rill of soap-sudsy water still trickled from one 
of the conduits, and, seeing a crowd, I stopped to find 
out what nothing or other had gathered it. One 
charm of Rome, is that nobody has anything in par- 
ticular to do, or, if he has, can always stop doing it on 
the slightest pretext. I found that some eels had been 
discovered, and a very vivacious hunt was going on, 
the chief Nimrods being boys. I happened to be the 
first to see a huge eel wriggling from the mouth of a 
pipe, and pointed him out. Two lads at once rushed 
upon him. One essayed the capture with his naked 
hands, the other, more provident, had armed him- 
self with a rag of woollen cloth with which to maintain 
his grip more securely. Hardly had this latter ar- 
rested his slippery prize, when a ragged rascal, watch- 
ing his opportunity, snatched away the prize, and 
instantly secured it by thrusting the head into his 
mouth, and closing on it a set of teeth like an ivory 
vice. But alas for ill-got gain ! Rob Roy's 

" Good old plan, 
That he should take who has the power 
And he should keep who can," 

did not serve here. There is scarce a square rood 
in Rome without one or more stately cocked hats in it, 
emblems of authority and police. I saw the flash of 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 209 

the snow-white cross-belts, gleaming through that 
dingy crowd like the panache of Henry Quatre at 
Ivry, I saw the mad plunge of the canvas-shielded 
head-piece, sacred and terrible as that of Gessler; 
and while the greedy throng were dancing about the 
anguilliceps, each taking his chance twitch at the 
undulating object of all wishes, the captor dodging 
his head hither and thither, (vulnerable, like Achilles, 
only in his 'eel, as a British tourist would say,) a pair 
of broad blue shoulders parted the assailants as a 
ship's bows part a wave, a pair of blue arms, ter- 
minating in gloves of Berlin thread, were stretched 
forth, not in benediction, one hand grasped the 
slippery Briseis by the waist, the other bestowed a 
cuff on the jaw-bone of Achilles, which loosened 
(rather by its authority than its physical force) the 
hitherto refractory incisors, a snufTy bandanna was 
produced, the prisoner was deposited in this tempo- 
rary watch-house, and the cocked hat sailed majes- 
tically away with the property thus sequestered for 
the benefit of the state. 

" Gaudeant anguillae si mortuus sit homo illo, 
Qui, quasi morte reas, excruciabat eas ! " 

If you have got through that last sentence without 
stopping for breath, you are fit to begin on the Homer 
of Chapman, who, both as translator and author, has 
the longest wind, (especially for a comparison,) with- 
out, being long-winded, of all writers I know anything 
of, not excepting Jeremy Taylor. 



JUL 25 1906 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

015 762 625 5 i 



'HJ^^^^^^^H 


liii 


mm^i 


i ;■, ii i« 


'"" 


m i 

iimuu ii 




liiidiUlilihiti 



